Brendan Ryan (Labour)

The Government proposes to hold a referendum on citizenship. On 17 February the Taoiseach told my party leader that the Government had no proposal to hold a referendum to change the Constitution in this regard. On 20 April 1998 he informed my then party leader that no legislation would be proposed by the Government to the Oireachtas, which imposes restrictions on the entitlement to Irish nationality and citizenship of persons born in Ireland.

Wearing my engineer's hat, the first thing to do with a problem is to define it precisely. We in the Opposition are entitled to know what precisely is the problem. When we hear senior representatives of maternity hospitals at the very least questioning the Minister's reasoning and when others who have served on the boards of these hospitals tell me that the proportion of asylum seekers coming to their hospitals is reducing in recent times, I am entitled to ask whether there is a coincidence of timing between this proposal being floated and the election on 11 June. If there were such a connection, it would represent a desperately cynical move on the part of the Government.

While there may be a problem to be addressed, it deserves to be dealt with dispassionately and calmly. The Opposition is entitled to hard information explaining how this arose so that we do not get involved in a referendum campaign in which dreadful things would be done and in which certain people in some political parties will again get carte blanche to say the sort of stuff they said during the general election.

Yesterday in the Dáil, the Taoiseach announced that the Government would not proceed with the fundamental proposal of the task force on emigration and would not establish an agency to provide services for the Irish abroad. He also let it be known that no money on the scale proposed would be made available. Given that we have had so much talk about the tragedy of elderly Irish people abroad and that the country is not that hard up, this is a dreadful decision. I wish to move an amendment to the Order of Business that No. 20, motion No. 23, on the Order Paper in the names of the Labour Party and Fine Gael Senators be taken at the commencement of business today.

The Government produced a paper on the working time directive and how it affects hospital doctors at a European Council meeting, without having presented it to the Members of the Oireachtas. I thought we had moved beyond the days of secretive meetings in Brussels to change the rules. As we are entitled to see this, I ask the Leader to seek a copy of the paper the Government submitted.

A topic raised in the media yesterday was the apparent perpetual shipping of Irish waste to anywhere we can find a fool in Europe to accept it. I was most upset by the Environmental Protection Agency being quoted as stating: "If this second attempt to ship illegal waste abroad was found to be deliberate, then there should be a prosecution." I expect more from our Environmental Protection Agency than that sort of lily-livered statement. Of course it was deliberate and we are making fools of ourselves. This incident involved local authority waste supposedly going for recycling and they are looking for a dump somewhere in Europe. We are being disgraced in Europe by our attitude to waste.