Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. Coming from where he does, like my county, his county is on the Border and he will have a certain familiarity with passports, nationality and such matters. While I have a certain degree of sympathy with Senator Leyden's interesting contribution, the sad fact is this Bill has been brought forward because the passports for sale scheme was totally and utterly discredited and created enormous embarrassment for the Government and the country in general. We were being touted around the world because not only were passports being sold, but the administration of the scheme within existing law was being flouted as well. From reading the Bill I believe that is where Senator Quinn is coming from. Notwithstanding the benefits arising from the original concept, which I am sure was introduced with the noblest motivation – Senator Leyden was attempting to convey the context in which this was introduced – on balance I understand where the Minister is coming from in his broad sympathy for the main thrust of the Bill.

Senator Leyden is right. We all would have welcomed a bunch of Hong Kong businessmen and others, certainly in my part of the country, if they had said they would invest money in return for passports. As Senator Leyden said, this is and continues to be perfectly normal practice in the United Kingdom. However, that basic point has been made by others as well as by me.

Will the Minister tell us when the new passports will be available in all overseas embassies? These are passports with the new chip in them and though they are available in Dublin they are not available in all overseas embassies. When will that be rolled out in its entirety? Also, how will the Minister address the loophole created by the Good Friday Agreement, which has only been partially closed by the Supreme Court ruling of 23 January this year? All of us are familiar with the clause in the Agreement, on which we voted, stating that anyone born on the island of Ireland was automatically entitled to Irish citizenship. That was voted on at a time when immigration, asylum seekers, refugees and all the other sad dimensions of the human endeavour were not visited on Ireland in any great numbers.

I raise this issue in the context of the Bill for reasons going back to Senator Leyden's last point. I too am proud to be Irish and proud to carry my passport. I put a particular value on carrying an Irish passport but I do not see how one can continue to operate a system when people deliberately use the law to ensure they have children born in this country without any loyalty to or knowledge of our mores, society, history or culture. They would only see this as a convenience, as we are somewhat unique in Europe, and the world, in this regard. It is all because of the goodness that flowed from the Good Friday Agreement, when we wished to reach out to our Northern brethren and say: "You are as entitled to be Irish as the rest of us if you are born on the island of Ireland". Sadly, as has been pointed out in this debate, there were no qualifying conditions.