The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, has claimed that up to half all non-EU nationals who give birth in Ireland are motivated by a desire to obtain Irish citizenship for their children.
Such claims amount to a change of focus by the Minister in the citizenship referendum debate, as he has previously concentrated on the number of non-EU non-nationals presenting late in their pregnancies to give birth in Irish maternity hospitals.
Mr McDowell's move to include all non-EU non-national parents in the argument for the referendum came after the emergence of figures yesterday which showed that 116 non-nationals booked into the Coombe Hospital last year within three weeks of birth. This followed separate figures which showed that there were 442 births at the Rotunda and Holles Street hospitals last year to non-EU nationals who booked the hospitals late, or who arrived without booking.
Mr McDowell's latest intervention moved the debate away from such figures, which imply that the number of women arriving late in their pregnancies to give birth in Ireland represented only a tiny proportion of all births.
He said yesterday that the birth-rate among all non-nationals was "much higher than the average" in their desire to secure Irish citizenship for their children. "I believe it's of the order of 40 or 50 per cent of those having children in Ireland, who are non-nationals and who are non-EU nationals, are having children motivated by a desire to have Irish citizenship for their children.
"And last year in the three Dublin maternity hospitals there was approximately 4,400 births to non-EU non-nationals and I believe that a very significant proportion of them were born to parents who were motivated by the desire to have citizenship for their children."
Fine Gael questioned whether separate legal measures introduced in 2001 demonstrated that Irish citizenship could be varied through legislation. The party's justice spokesman, Mr Jim O'Keeffe, said that a section in the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act of 2001 showed that the citizenship entitlements of Irish-born children whose parents had diplomatic immunity could be varied in law.
The Act says that a child born in Ireland to a non-national, who at the time of birth was entitled to diplomatic immunity, shall not be an Irish citizen unless they make a declaration of Irish citizenship or that someone makes such a declaration for them.
Mr O'Keeffe asked: "If you can regulate the citizenship of the children born to one type of non-national, why can you not also legislate for the citizenship of other categories without a constitutional referendum?" He went on: "On the face of it, there is a conflict between what the Minister is saying about Article 2 and this provision which regulates the citizenship of a child born to one particular category of non-national." However, a spokesman for Mr McDowell said the 2001 legislation was needed to correct the provision in the Belfast Agreement which gave a blanket entitlement to citizenship to all Irish-born children.
