Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I rarely use phrases such as "more in sorrow than in anger". However, I think it is an appropriate phrase here. The Minister makes a coherent case for dealing with what he believes to be a problem. It is no more than I would expect. He puts together a coherent constitutional legal case for dealing with the problem and he identifies anomalous issues in the Good Friday Agreement, using those to further build a case for resolving the issue. The whole flaw, of course, is that this document which he produced on 10 March fails miserably to suggest that there is a problem about the claiming of citizenship. I quote from the document: "Statistics on the nationalities of mothers of children born in the State have not been collected in a systematic way in the past."

We knew something about asylum seekers because we kept an eye on them. We now know that asylum seekers are not the majority — in fact they are a minority — of the non-national mothers who give birth in our hospitals. We know that the position of two of our senior doctors was misrepresented, accidentally I presume, in the days after the Minister produced his briefing document. We know that the Taoiseach, on 17 February, told the Dáil that there were no plans for a referendum. Three weeks later, approximately, we were told there would probably be a referendum. We went from "no referendum" to a referendum in three weeks on the basis of a document which admits that the information is patchy and which underlines that nothing is known about the motives of non-national mothers who arrive here. I quote from the Minister's document: "Anecdotal evidence suggests that many women are travelling from the UK in the later stages of pregnancy."

What an extraordinarily plausible and coherent position to be in, staging a referendum on the same day as an election based on what the Minister himself concludes is anecdotal evidence, with no evidence at all in some cases. The remainder of his document is equally confusing, switching from non-EU nationals to non-nationals almost paragraph by paragraph. The consequence of this is to mislead and confuse. He admits in the bulk of the document that the problem is not with asylum seekers but proceeds to produce pages and pages of data in Appendix 1 about them. The conclusion I draw is what we knew to be the case — the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform was always unhappy with Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution, as they were drafted in the Good Friday Agreement. The Department could not coherently object during a referendum on the Good Friday Agreement. However, it wanted to close the gap that it — in its peculiar capacity to identify problems nobody else can — believed to be there. It started off on the campaign which ended up in the Supreme Court judgment about the "non-right" of the parents of a child born in this country to remain in Ireland. It achieved that part of its objective, so it then started on the next stage. Contrary to what the Minister says, however, it did not tell anybody about it. An Agreed Programme for Government stated——