Section 4 of the Senator's Bill is based on an assumption that the issuing of passports by the Minister for Foreign Affairs is wholly divorced from the question of whether the person to whom the passport is being given is an Irish national. It is undoubtedly the case that statute law is at best sketchy when it comes to the issue of passports. It is not, however, the case that there is a legal blank sheet in Irish or EU law. If the Minister for Foreign Affairs was, in some notional Government, to set up procedures for the wholesale granting of Irish passports to persons who were patently not Irish citizens, the law, either at national or EU level, might shoot such procedures down. The passport is evidence of Irish citizenship, but it is not Irish citizenship itself.