Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

They are not applying for anything. If they came back and lived in Ranelagh, they could vote in the next general election. I cannot telephone the registrar or the man in charge of the voter register in Dublin City Council and say those people should not be on the register because they should not have been Irish citizens in the first place. I am not in a position to say they should be denied a birth certificate, a vote and so on because of a question I have over their citizenship. They are either Irish citizens or they are not. If they are Irish citizens, they are entitled to vote in a referendum or general election and to come in to Ireland subject to, I presume, some kind of extreme ordre publique argument.

A passport is a prima facie entitlement of a citizen as is the right to come to Ireland and vote in an election if one resides here. I cannot selectively start to strip citizens of normal rights because I have a question mark in my mind about whether they were appropriately granted citizenship in the first place. I am not even clear whether we could change the law retrospectively to allow different grounds of revocation but we might be able to do so. That is a point for the Attorney General too. As long as they remain prima facie Irish citizens, they cannot be stripped of the rights which go prima facie with that status.