Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I cannot accept the amendment because the issue is too complicated. The Chief Registrar was with me when I met the families. We had a good discussion with them and are considering the issue in the context of an amendment to registration law. There are a number of issues to be dealt with. The extension to all citizens who die abroad is impractical. Under our law, if one is the grandson or granddaughter of a person born in Ireland, one is entitled to Irish citizenship, so we are talking about millions of people. That is definitely out of the question. The debate centres around other people's domicile, and mostly this refers to people who went away, for example, on holidays, so the legislation would have to be confined to that. It would not be practicable to go any further than that. One then gets into other issues.

The documentation required for the registration of a death in the State is based on the requirements of the civil registration legislation. Should the provisions be extended, registrars would, as a matter of routine, be required to deal with documentation based on a variety of legislative provisions for many countries. This would inevitably undermine the present standardised approach relating to evidence of the event and the recording of the details of the deceased. This would have an effect on epidemiological studies and so on. There would also be the issue of resolving arguments about the cause and place of death and so on, where such arguments arose.

One of the issues the families mentioned was that it would not be a death certificate in the legal sense we know it in Ireland. What they really want is a recording of the death in Ireland, not necessarily the document that is needed for all types of legal purposes which is normally obtained from the country of origin. There is an exception in our law which provides that if a country does not provide a death certificate, we can do it. That is in law. If one dies in a country that will not provide a death certificate, one can be obtained here. Where a person dies in a country with a well-developed registration system and the death certificate can be obtained, for legal purposes that document covers everything.

I have heard what the families have said, that they want some Irish record of the death. Whether that would be a death certificate in the legal sense or something slightly different is worth looking at. We will examine this situation and I am anxious to progress it in the context of any further law. It will take time and the families know and are agreeable to that. I have given an undertaking to review the existing provisions of the Civil Registration Act 2004 and this issue will be dealt with in that context. I have to engage in considerable consultation before this matter is brought to a conclusion.