Government accused of misinformation

The director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties has accused the Government of deliberately spreading misinformation among the electorate about the citizenship referendum.

Ms Aisling Reidy instanced "the repeated untrue assertion" by Government spokespeople that there is no other country in the world that grants citizenship by birth, as well as "misleading information" about the numbers of non-nationals born in Ireland and the requirements of EU law.

Addressing a weekend conference on the issue, Ms Reidy said the Taoiseach had made a "patently inaccurate" statement about the citizenship laws in other countries.

In contrast to what had been said, Ireland's current laws, which grant citizenship from birth, were the same as those in over 40 other countries, including the US, Canada, New Zealand, India, Pakistan and most of Latin America, she stated.

However, the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, again defended his proposals, saying Ireland's citizenship laws were "well out of line" with those in the rest of Europe. The amendment would only restore the constitutional position which obtained until the signing of the Good Friday agreement in 1998, he told RTÉ's Saturday View programme.

Ms Reidy said the Government had gone out of its way to rush the proposal to the people, to avoid consultation and to stifle debate or information around the referendum.

"Unfortunately, the one thing that is certain in this very contentious referendum is that the proponents have been desperate to ensure there is no hearing, no rational inquiry, no consultation and in particular no requirement for them to justify the need for their referendum. It is hardly surprising that the impression is that the people are being unduly pressed into a particular decision," she told the conference, which was organised by the TCD Law School.

The proposed wording would, if passed, create a category of children born in Ireland who had an "entitlement and birthright" to be part of the "Irish nation", but who were not citizens or nationals.

Prof William Binchy of TCD Law School said the referendum was divisive and ill-timed. The creation of two categories of people, citizens and non-citizens, was "utterly the wrong way to go".

Prof Binchy said the referendum sought to achieve its goal by "targeting children innocent of any wrong". By abolishing the entitlement to citizenship of children born in Ireland to non-citizens, it placed these children under "a shadow of legal uncertainty" so far as the protection of their fundamental constitutional rights was concerned.

This was because several of these key rights are described in the Constitution as attaching to "citizens".

The proposal was based on no coherent empirical evidence, and relied instead on anecdote and intuition.

"Even if not the intent of its proponents, it surely risks legitimising negative attitudes towards foreigners at a time when social policy should be reminding us of our common humanity and equal dignity." Prof Binchy criticised the way Mr McDowell dealt with arguments against his proposal, saying his manner was to dismiss rather than address them.

He said the Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Ms Coughlan, was repeating "mantra-like" that the proposal had no constitutional implication, but failed to put forward any arguments in support of this view.

Prof Ivana Bacik of TCD Law School, who is standing as a Labour candidate in the European elections, said the Minister's suggestion about women arriving in Ireland late in labour purely to give birth had contributed to the "growing demonisation" of pregnant non-national women, particularly those from Africa.

"Even if women are being flown in just to give birth (and there is no evidence of this), then the Minister has not explained why this gives rise to any difficulty, other than highlighting the need to provide adequate resources to maternity hospitals."

If this was the case, the answer was not to penalise the mothers and their children, but instead to target the traffickers flying them in, she said.

"The referendum proposal is a grossly disproportionate measure, since it will not just have the effect of depriving children born to non-national mothers straight off the plane of citizenship; but will also deprive of citizenship those children born to non-national parents who have lived and worked in Ireland for a period of years before the birth."

It would also leave open to future governments the ability to impose greater restrictions on citizenship.

Ms Cathryn Costello, a research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, described the debate about the proposed change as "hurried, frantic and emotive". The Government had failed to provide any strong ethical arguments, "instead offering the scantiest of policy justifications and invoking a disingenuous guise of humanitarian impulse".