Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent)

On behalf of the Technical Group, all of it, I wish to welcome the fact that we are having a referendum on this treaty. I only regret that it was not called without having to go to the Attorney General. What happened in this case was that the Government was against holding a referendum, as enunciated by the Minister for Transport earlier, because it would apparently involve a lot of extraneous issues and it would be difficult to have a referendum on this issue.

I welcome this because it gives us and the people an opportunity to debate wider issues than just this one, which will come into it. It is a pity that the Government did not, first of all, voluntarily go down this road. When it came into power it should also have held a referendum on the EU-IMF deal.

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