Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I might have been happy if the Minister had not gone on at such great length. Like all the Minister's statistics up to now, once one checks them, one finds that they are utterly trite, tendentious and lacking in intellectual integrity. Perhaps the Minister is correct. I do not know, and that is the point. Everything he has said so far is open to a different interpretation or question. Ultimately, one must decide whether there is a problem, which is the best one can say. We must rely on disputed meetings between the Minister and senior medical people. In some instances, statistics turn out to be different in reality from what he suggested. We had a "seat of the pants" estimate of 40% to 50%, based on nothing he has as yet made known to me, including today's statistics, which he heavily qualified in his live address here.

What we must worry about is how precise is this whole case. To add to the sense of imprecision, when speaking on 7 April on the similarity between the conditions he proposed and those that existed for the spouses of non-Irish citizens, he said that if a non-national marries an Irish citizen, he or she must remain in the State for three years before being entitled as of right to become a citizen. I find this astonishing. The truth is that spouses of Irish nationals do not have a right to become citizens. They have a right to apply to become citizens, and there is written into the law an absolute discretion for the Minister. That may well be what the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform calls a right, but it is not what I would call a right. Is that the sort of right people will have under his future legislation?

I have experienced a problem over the 20 or so years I have been in this House. The response of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform to any abuse of a right appears to be to abolish it. The Minister was eloquent towards the end of his speech about the sensitivity of his Department. I was looking for some information this morning and I was told on the telephone that the immigration and citizenship section only deals with telephone queries between 10 a.m. and 12 noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which represents wonderful sensitivity.

I had the experience of having to make representations on behalf of 15 year olds coming on a school tour to Dublin who were refused entry visas by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, even though they had the legal right to stay in Britain. It happened two years in a row, so it was not an accident. I watched the abolition of the right of citizens. I spoke to a number of people who applied for naturalisation and live in a state of entire frustration. I am supposed to believe that I should entrust the right of citizenship to that sort of attitude. What we have in this referendum is a "Queen of Hearts" or "Alice in Wonderland" scenario, whereby words mean what one says they mean, the same words having changed meaning as we discussed the issue.

There is a situation now whereby the Commission on Human Rights, the SDLP, Sinn Féin, the DUP and the Opposition are wrong. Everyone is wrong on both the issue and the timing. We were and are prepared to be reasonable about the issue. While everyone was wrong, the Taoiseach discovered someone who agreed with him. He referred yesterday in the Dáil to the President of Nigeria who apparently told him it was a problem. The DUP, SDLP, Sinn Féin and everyone else was wrong but the President of Nigeria was right about what was wrong with our citizenship laws. One is scrabbling when one searches that far for allies.

The only conclusion one can draw is that this issue was neither urgent nor properly defined. There was nothing critical and we could have left plenty of time to have it described, quantified and an agreed position reached, including the Northern parties, instead of putting yet another spanner in already difficult works. If the Minister wants to know what this amendment may do, he should listen to the telephone messages that come into the various radio chat shows, where every bigot and racist is queuing up to kick the immigrants and the black people they dislike so much. The Minister may believe they are wrong, but this gives hope and encouragement to the worst element of our society. To do that knowingly, in the middle of an election, is either a sign of extraordinary political incompetence, and I do not believe that is the case, or is a deliberate intent to get the bigoted element to vote in a referendum, because they would see it as a way to get their own back on people they think should not be here. That is fomenting and pandering to the worst type of cynicism in a country where the Opposition has behaved with extraordinary restraint on the issue of immigration. The Government should be grateful that we had, until recently, a consensus on immigration but that has been destroyed. As it has been destroyed, my party will be voting against this Bill in the House and will be campaigning against it in the country.