John Paul Phelan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

A passport is generally accepted as the definitive document, but for those who have gone through the recent citizenship ceremonies and have the documentation that accompanies them, that documentation is of a similar status.

I understand where Deputy Paul Murphy is coming from with his suggestion that this is anti-democratic but I disagree with him completely. We have always adopted the position that citizenship is linked to certain entitlements. To the people who voted to remain, we are not saying "Tough luck, the majority voted the other way", but we cannot and should not dilute the entitlements of citizenship by giving complete and open access to the elections to the European Parliament. We allow this at local election level because a resident in any ward or district of a local authority has skin in the game as regards the footpaths, the lights, the roads etc. If international decisions are made that are beyond somebody's control, there has to be some sort of knock-on effect.

The Attorney General considered the cases to which the Deputy referred and we have had a lot of discussion about this in the past couple of weeks. Legal advice was sought prior to the development of the Bill, which concluded that while it might be possible for a member state to allow citizens of third countries resident in their territories to vote in European Parliament elections, the better and more prudent view is that there exists a minimum requirement to hold European Union citizenship as a precondition to vote at, and stand in, European elections. Further legal advice was sought while the Bill was being drafted and the issue was discussed in many different fora outside this House. The opinion of counsel was that any proposal to enfranchise British citizens resident in Ireland after withdrawal for the purposes of the European elections would be inconsistent with the law of the European Union. This is the Government position and it is one with which I fully agree.

I take Deputy O'Sullivan's point. The process of reforming the register has begun and we are looking at the issue of public information. People can change their status on the register up to the supplementary register and there may be a category of people, identified by the Deputy and referred to by other Deputies, who have taken out Irish citizenship since the Brexit vote, some more famously than others. They need to be aware of the "L" and the "E" in the side columns determining in which categories of election they can vote. We will do some work to promote the need to check the register to see that the relevant letter is opposite their names to entitle them to vote.

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