Derek McDowell (Labour)

No one said someone who was driving a taxi in Bucharest has a right to come here just because he is bored with his life. No one suggested that Saddam Hussein, if he had an Irish born child, would be brought within the contemplation of the Opposition amendments. We are talking about a very clear case of the parents of Irish citizens. The Minister may say such people do not have rights or may not be worthy of those rights, and he may be right. However, it is not fair to say those rights are not grounded in judicial decisions or entitlements. The courts have decided that while the parents of Irish citizens born in Ireland do not have an entitlement to stay here they do have some rights. Those rights are, of course, ancillary to the rights of the child but they are, nonetheless, rights. The Minister makes the case that his decision is an Executive decision. My point is that one cannot divorce that from the rights set out and duly circumscribed by the Supreme Court.

Even if we ignore the argument as to whether the appeals mechanism is a judicial process, what Senator Cummins says is correct. The decision making process is not clear and transparent. It might serve the Minister and his successors well, assuming that it takes us a few years to enact this legislation, if we had a clear and transparent mechanism. That might save the Minister from the newspaper stories which appear every two weeks. There is one in the newspapers today, although it is not particularly reflective of these amendments. Such stories usually tell of people who appear to have been hard done by. A transparent mechanism allowing for an appeal against a ministerial decision might be no harm. I recognise from the Minister's tone that he clearly has no intention of contemplating that but I thought it was worth making the point again nonetheless.

The amendments may apply to 16,000 cases and that may imply 30,000. We know that not all of those people want to be in Ireland. Many of them will want to be in other parts of the European Union. We will not be swamped by people who want to take up residence in this country. Following the passage of this Bill we will have a clear legal position. We now have an opportunity to draw the line. It is neither pragmatic nor reasonable for the Minister or his Department to be tied up, possibly for years to come, in making decisions on a range of cases, whether there are 16,000 or 30,000 or even more. At least we now know there is a finite number of cases. We should just be done with them.