Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome that clarification because senior officials from the Department of Social Protection attended a meeting of the Joint Committee on Public Service Oversight and Petitions about two weeks ago and they had not been given the go-ahead from the Department of Justice and Equality on those payments at that stage. That would be welcome and it is high time it happened.

I concur with the Minister of State's view on the referendum which took away citizenship from children who were not born here. That was a retrograde step. However, I must put it to the Minister of State that he is in the ministerial chair now. I take on board comments made by Senator Bacik that only certain matters can be dealt with in this legislation. While we all welcome the single protection procedure, we have been waiting for this legislation for 12 years. When is the statelessness issue going to be dealt with and how? Where is the legislation that will address it? Why not put it into this legislation to clear it up once and for all? It is both the place and the time to do it. Where do those children who are now living in direct provision - some of whom were born in that system - but who do not belong to a state, stand under this legislation? What is being done, in the spirit of the work done by the working group, to give children in direct provision a sense of belonging to a country? What is being done to allow them to express their Irishness and to feel as Irish as any other child? How is that going to be dealt with? Surely the statelessness issue is one that must be dealt with in this Bill, as has been outlined by the organisations I mentioned earlier.