Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

Interestingly, we could spend many hours discussing whether there is a distinction to be drawn between citizenship and nationality in practical terms today, as they are used interchangeably in many documents and areas. This sounds terrible, but I believe that a theoretical distinction between the two existed in Europe until the Second World War. There were some societies in Europe which counted women as their nationals but refused them citizenship. I may be wrong, but I believe that Germany, at one stage, accorded nationality but not citizenship to women. There may have been some other states. One of the great attributes of de Valera's Constitution was that he guaranteed citizenship regardless of gender. At the time, that was worth saying, although it seems self-evident to us now. In those days, it was not a self-evident proposition in international law that men and women were considered equally entitled to be citizens of every state. There was a distinction, which has now become largely redundant, between citizenship and nationality for the purposes of constitutional law.