Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I am. I usually enjoy the Minister's combative nature and suspect that to a degree he may enjoy mine. In that regard, we have sometimes let people down. Some years ago, Mr. Pat Kenny was disappointed when he failed to start a row between us because we ended up agreeing about more than we expected. Mr. Kenny had expected blood under the studio door.

I will not get cross but the Minister's justification for holding a referendum on this issue on 11 June is, to quote an eminent authority, "trite, tendentious and lacking in intellectual integrity". I quote the best authority in that regard.

I teach engineering to students. It is not to my credit that they are very successful. They compete for jobs with American multinationals based in my home city and do so very well. I teach them about problem solving and tell them the first thing a person must do is define a problem otherwise an enormous amount of time, energy and resources can be wasted solving the wrong problem. The first test is to identify if a problem exists, how big it is, if it is getting bigger or smaller and whether it can be quantified. I will return to that point. I also teach my students about the need to order business efficiently. Everybody knows how one goes about ordering a meeting. One gives priority to and deals first with the urgent and important matters. A matter must be important and urgent to get priority.

Let us now look at how this issue has emerged. On 19 February, the Taoiseach told us there were no proposals for a referendum. One has to assume something extraordinary happened between 19 February and 10 March. However, there was no sudden change, nothing happened; there was no organised conspiracy. Both Houses have in the past dealt with legislation in less than one day when the Government satisfied the Leaders of the Opposition that there was an urgent and important issue to be dealt with.

On 10 March, we received a briefing document from which the Minister has at this stage, gracefully or ungracefully, retreated because it contained so much misleading information and near distortions, with an appendix which made vast reference to asylum seekers. We then had the story of the masters' pleading, which, it emerged, was a meeting the Minister had organised and which the masters had attended, and in which I accept the need to deal with some immigration issues was mentioned. However, the masters insist the meeting was about a resource issue. The Minister remembers better than they do because he keeps on saying it.

The famous brief my colleague, Deputy Costello, received on 10 March referred to the fact that many of the non-nationals were late arrivals. The document was wonderfully confusing with non-EU nationals being juxtaposed with non-nationals. We later discovered that the document was referring to non-nationals of the United Kingdom as well. So we were discussing non-EU nationals, non-UK nationals and non-Irish nationals. That document seemed to disappear and we then focused on the late arrivals. I accept there is a genuine humanitarian health care issue concerning late arrivals. However, it then turned out that the late arrivals were a pretty mixed bunch and that some of them, including some of the non-EU nationals, were coming from within the State.

We then moved on to the Minister's seat of the pants estimate of 40% to 50%. This is precisely what I would advise a first-year engineering student not to do. He should not rely on what he believed but should go and establish the facts. Enough mistakes have been made in industry by doing what is believed to be right without testing the assumptions to fill half a dozen textbooks. I would have thought that the extraordinary degree of education that eminent barristers get would have advised them of a similar need to be cautious about personal assumptions.

We now have today's statistics from the Minister, which mention birth rates, etc. While the Minister was speaking, I took the time to investigate. The Minister plays tricks with statistics. He correctly quotes the 1.8 million Irish females and mentions a birth rate of 1%. However, only about half of those females are of childbearing age.