Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

The Taoiseach told me yesterday that he interpreted the Minister as saying he did intend to have such a referendum, the implication being that it would be held along with the referendum on the rights of the child. Is the Minister now resiling from the position that he intends to recommend to Cabinet that a referendum be held to excise this reference and that it be held this year along with the referendum on the rights of the child?

What exactly is going on here? If the referendum on the rights of the child were to proceed this year, the Government could not reasonably prevent the holding of three by-elections. I wonder whether the Government is teeing up a range of other putative constitutional referendums to be tacked on to the referendum on the rights of the child, thereby delaying it until 2011. In the answer the Minister has given, he is backtracking on what I understood the position to be when I came into the House and on the answer the Taoiseach gave me yesterday.

Taking the Minister at his word that there will be a referendum some time within the lifetime of this Government, which is looking particularly rickety at the moment, I ask him to explain his intended proposition. He gave us a long justification of the re-installation of the section concerned in the Defamation Act, which relates to Article 40.6.1° of the Constitution. Is it his intention only to excise the word "blasphemous" from the article, or is it his intention, as recommended by the Constitution Review Group, to recast the entire article, which, at the moment, from the point of view of freedom of expression, reads more like something that might have been imported from a theocratic state in the Middle East?

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