Michael Kitt (Galway East, Fianna Fail)

I will try to deal with some of the questions. In respect of Senator Alex White's point about official duties, there are some examples I could give. A state funeral which a former Member of the Oireachtas or Minister might be asked to attend would be one. In respect of questions about the lord mayor or mayor of a city or county, those applications could be looked at on a case by case basis. Probably the best example of where we have issued many passports would be the United Nations contingent which has been serving overseas. The most recent contingent went to Chad. These people, who are working with the UN, would get diplomatic passports.

I find in my work that many former Deputies and Senators are very keen to work as observers in elections and do a very good job because they are the real professionals when it comes to observing elections and seeing if they are the free and fair elections we all want to have. Those are situations where people would get diplomatic passports, which is only right and fitting.

A diplomatic passport establishes a person's status. If one was looking for immunity, a court could take that situation into account. There might be a certain degree of courtesy extended by countries because one has a diplomatic passport. There are no hard and fast rules about that. It might be a custom but would not be claimed as a right.

On one occasion, when some of my colleagues and I were travelling from Israel to Jordan, we were amazed to discover that we did not have to pay the $60 levy because we had diplomatic passports. We would have had to pay this fee if we did not have these passports. There is probably a practical reason why one might have a diplomatic passport if one was travelling between countries.