Brian Hayes (Fine Gael)

I am as sure as is the Minister that is an absolute right. That is the reason I suggest he should have gone down the route, as others have suggested, of putting the legislation in place and testing it in the courts. That would have been more sensible.

I heard the Minister's interview last week on "Today with Pat Kenny". The Minister said the job of rounding up people in the dead of night and ensuring they are sent out of the country was not nice. I sympathise with him because it is not an easy job to do. Nobody that I know of would take pleasure in such a task. Certainly I would not ascribe to the Minister the notion that he would take pleasure from this type of activity. It is a difficult job but it has to be done. There should be a procedure in place for the people who go through the system and lose out on appeal. It is logical that something has to be done with them.

I appreciate the comments made by the Minister. He said that when he saw the context of the new Article 2 as proposed as a result of the Good Friday Agreement, it stood out from the pages at the time in 1998. At that stage the Minister was not the senior law officer of the land. I find it interesting that within three years he was giving advice to the then Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy O'Donoghue, in respect of the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 2001, which has limits to citizenship rights in terms of persons born on the island of Ireland. The Minister well knows that there are two specific cases. Diplomats whose children happen to be born in this country are not automatically Irish citizens because it sets that out in section 6(2) of the 2001 Act and those children born on vessels coming into this country equally are not guaranteed automatic rights of citizenship.