February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Sinn Fein, the SDLP and the DUP have attacked the planned poll, saying that Northern Irish political parties ought to have been consulted first.
Article 2 of the Irish constitution grants every child born on the island of Ireland Irish citizenship. The article is also quoted in the Good Friday agreement, which cannot be amended without all-party consultation.
The referendum is being held to close what Irish government officials say is the exploitation of the right to citizenship, allowing female asylum seekers to come to Ireland late in their pregnancies — as many as 60 percent of all recent female asylum seekers, according to officials.
The referendum will ask Irish voters to approve changing the constitution so that Irish citizenship will be granted only to a child who has at least one parent resident in Ireland for three years before its birth.
A British government spokesperson familiar with the issue said that the referendum would merely alter Article 9 of the Constitution, “which would qualify citizenship rights contained in Article 2.”
Fine Gael justice spokesperson Jim O’Keefe joined in the call for a consultation with all parties.
“At a very minimum, at this stage, what I would like to see is a process whereby the parties in Northern Ireland are able to give a view on the proposal,” he told the BBC.
The DUP has seized on the issue because the party campaigned in the November 2003 Northern Ireland Assembly elections for a major renegotiation of the Good Friday agreement. Party leader the Rev. Ian Paisley said last week that the Irish government is “unilaterally amending the agreement,” and that therefore the agreement is “dead.”
But legal experts for both governments say that the referendum does not endanger the agreement.
In fact, British experts said the British government inserted its own clause in the agreement’s text in 1998, to cover the possibility of people coming to Northern Ireland and claiming British or Irish citizenship for their newborns.
If passed, the referendum will represent the 27th amendment to the Irish constitution, which dates from 1937.