Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

The Attorney General's strong advice, which I accept, is that any law which sought to deprive a person born in Ireland of the entitlement of citizenship, or even to postpone the right of such a person to exercise that entitlement, would be shot down by the Supreme Court as being inconsistent with Article 2. There is no alternative to addressing this issue at constitutional level. That being the case, and having given the matter deep consideration, the Government has decided that the most appropriate way of amending the Constitution is by dealing with the matter in Article 9, which already contains provisions relating to the power of the Oireachtas to legislate for the acquisition and loss of Irish nationality and citizenship.

That Article 9 power extends to provisions as regards the acquisition of Irish citizenship by descent and by naturalisation, but does not allow the Oireachtas power to limit Irish citizenship acquired by birth in Ireland. The amendment proposed restores that power to some extent, but it would not allow citizenship to be redefined and qualified by statute in an unfettered way. That is not and could not be the case. Any change, as a matter of international law, must be consistent with the British-Irish Agreement, which guarantees the continuing entitlement of the people of Northern Ireland to be Irish citizens. The change to the Constitution proposed limits the scope of the Oireachtas's discretion to legislate, by confining that discretion to cases where the person is born in Ireland to parents, neither of whom is, or is entitled to be, an Irish citizen at the time of the birth. The proposal does not give rise to any reasonable fears about the identity and interests of the people of Northern Ireland or about how those matters could be addressed by future legislation.

Deputies will note from the detail of the draft implementing Bill that it is intended that the statutory provisions will apply in a similar way to persons born, whether north or south, to non-national parents with lawful residence.

I am confident that this House and the Seanad will be able to address the subject matter of the Bill and the Government's proposals in a most exhaustive way. By the time these proposals get to the people, their decision will have been fully informed by the parliamentary process on which we are embarking — however hesitantly — this morning. I see no reason this matter should be referred to the Joint Committee on the Constitution, since by their stances already publicly expressed on the Government's proposals, at least two of the parties represented in this House have declared their opposition. The possibility for all-party agreement is therefore nil, and any attempt to seek it now is futile. I repeat, however, that the all-party committee in 1996 and 1997, chaired by Deputy O'Keeffe, received an expert report on this subject and nobody has ever suggested since that this analysis or conclusion was wrong.

People have criticised this proposal as racist.

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