The Labour Party asserted in 1998 that an amendment to the citizenship provisions in Article 9 of the Constitution could be made without reopening the Belfast Agreement talks process.
This is contrary to the position of some of its spokespersons during the current citizenship debate that the proposal by the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, to amend Article 9 runs the risk of damaging the agreement.
In a letter to the Taoiseach on April 16th, 1998, just after the signing of the agreement, the then Labour Party leader, Mr Ruairí Quinn, proposed that an amendment could be made to Article 9 to clarify the entitlement to be part of the Irish nation contained in the proposed new Article 2.
His concern was that the proposed new Article 2 - to be put to the people arising from the Belfast Agreement - was creating a right to be considered part of "the Irish Nation".
However, the right to citizenship would continue to be dealt with under Article 9, which says the right to citizenship is to be regulated by law.
So while the new articles were being widely interpreted in April 1998 as conferring the right to citizenship of northern nationalists, he was concerned that it could be argued later that it did not do so.
A Labour Party spokesman last night rejected the suggestion that there was a comparison between what Mr Quinn was proposing back then and what Mr McDowell is proposing now.
"We have never said you can't amend Article 9. Our point is the amendment put at the moment involves negating the change made to Article 2 in 1998," he said. "What we were proposing would not have had that effect."