The Government plans legislation to outlaw any reintroduction of the controversial passports-for-investment scheme, the Minister for Justice has said. Mark Brennock and Colm Keena report.
The law will be introduced after the referendum on citizenship rights.
While the passport scheme was ended some years ago, it is currently open to any government to revive it, as it never existed in law.
Yesterday Mr McDowell said he had taken into account a private members' Bill from Sen Feargal Quinn proposing a legal bar on the reintroduction of such a scheme.
The scheme was ended in April 1998, having existed for 10 years. Its existence only came to public notice in 1994.
By 1998 approximately 150 passports had been issued under the scheme.
The Moriarty tribunal, which is investigating payments to Mr Charles Haughey, sought the files on the scheme from the Department of Justice in 1998.
In 1997 The Irish Times revealed that the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, had initiated three separate inquiries into Mr Ray Burke in relation to the granting of 11 passports to a wealthy Arab banker and his family and associates, in return for a promised investment of €25 million.
Two of the inquiries were conducted around the time Mr Ahern appointed Mr Burke minister to his government in 1997.
It emerged that Mr Burke personally authorised in his Co Swords home the naturalisation certificates of Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz and others, late on a Saturday in December 1990, instead of delegating the matter to a senior official as was standard practice.
The passports were handed over to Sheikh Khalid the following day by Mr Haughey during a lunch in the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin.
The first passports under the scheme were granted to a Hong Kong family who invested in a clothing firm, Shamrock Apparel, in Coolock, Co Dublin.
The scheme came to public attention in 1994 when it emerged that a wealthy Saudi businessman, Mr Khalid Masri, had invested €1.27 million in Mr Albert Reynolds's family firm, C&D Petfoods, under the scheme.
In 1999 it emerged that approximately €13,000 linked to the recipient of a passport had gone to Fianna Fáil as an interest-free loan.
The decision to scrap the scheme did not meet with universal approval.
Some business figures believed that the scheme was a valid and useful one, but that it needed to be free from political interference.
A Czech native, Mr Viktor Kozeny, who was given an Irish passport in 1995, was last year charged with fraud by the Czech authorities and declared a fugitive.
No passport issued under the scheme has ever been revoked.