The Labour Party leader has urged the electorate to vote against the Government's citizenship referendum on June 11th.
The leader of the Labour Party Pat Rabbitte
Opening the party's referendum campaign in Galway this afternoon, Labour leader Mr Pat Rabbitte said he believed it was "entirely unsafe" to follow the Government's lead in the matter of citizenship.
He said he had been in many parts of the State in the recent past and had found people "far more preoccupied" with issues concerning the health services, crime, traffic and childcare than with the referendum.
Mr Rabbitte said there was a "deep and growing anger" among the electorate over the Government's broken election promises and the "cynicism" with which it had approached virtually every issue.
The Labour leader said that if passed, the referendum would allow the enactment of laws deciding on which members of the nation will or will not be entitled to be citizens. The changes would confer on the Oireachtas the right to do whatever it wished in the future in relation to citizenship, he said.
Setting out the party's six reasons for voting No in the referendum, Mr Rabbitte said the constitution deserved care and there had been no consultation with anyone on the issues. In addition, he said the timing of the referendum alongside the local and European Parliament elections was cynical and that the Government had misled the public on the reasons for the referendum.
"Firstly, it claimed that the sole motivation for the referendum was the phenomenon of 'citizenship tourists', and it misrepresented the position of the Masters of the Dublin maternity hospitals. The Government produced misleading statistics for births of non-national children and later had to admit that only a tiny fraction of these births would be affected by the referendum," Mr Rabbitte said.
"When the figures didn't bear out the Government's case, they said the change was about the integrity of citizenship. But they still give out thousands of passports every year to people born in other parts of the world whose grandparents are Irish."