Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

That report was sent for consideration to an all-party Oireachtas constitutional committee, then chaired by Deputy Jim O'Keeffe and of which I was a member. Let me congratulate Deputy Jim O'Keeffe on his appointment as Fine Gael spokesman on justice, a position he last held in 1979.

That all-party committee set itself a work agenda and studied that report. No member of that committee at that time ever suggested that the conclusions on citizenship by birth made by that group were wrong. The report pointed to the danger of attempting to write into the Constitution a right of citizenship based on birth, without providing for the complex conditions and exceptions which would be dictated by common sense and would best be left to the statute law of the State. We do not need another expert review or another all-party committee to give us the same advice eight years later.

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