Group acting for Filipino nurses calls for No vote

Anti-amendment campaign: A group representing the Republic's 3,500 Filipino nurses has joined more than 50 other organisations and lobby groups to call for a No vote in the citizenship referendum.

The League of Filipino Nurses said the constitutional amendment would deny rights to children born to families who had come to Ireland "in good faith to work, live and bring up their families here".

Mr Dale Belino, a Filipino nurse at James Connolly Memorial Hospital, Blanchardstown, who has been living in Dublin since 2000, said last year 235 children were born to Filipino women in Ireland, many of whom were providing nursing and childcare services.

"It seems to us that our children have done nothing to deserve this and yet it is they who are being deprived of their rights. The referendum is about a blanket denial of rights to children of families like us."

Belfast-based trade unionist Ms Inez McCormack, a former member of the Northern Ireland Human rights Commission, said it was a disgrace that "the race card is being played" to exclude from Irish citizenship the children of Filipino nurses working in the North, too.

The former Irish Congress of Trade Unions president said the amendment breached the spirit of the Good Friday agreement, which sought to "set behind us aspects of division, discrimination and denial of identity."

She said, "The right of all born in Ireland to be citizens, without discrimination, was a key part of the agreement." This was being changed without hearing the voice of those who negotiated and voted on the deal, North and South.

Mr Owen Keenan, chief executive of Barnardos, was among a number of other speakers at a packed press conference in the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, yesterday. Expressing "deep concern" about the referendum's implications, he said: "We are not satisfied with the explanations offered by Government spokespersons and believe that it is fundamentally unsound to hold the referendum at this time.

"The Government does not seem to have carried out any impact assessment on whether this referendum is in the best interest of children in Ireland, despite the fact that Government policy obliges the Government to do so before taking any major decision or action with significant consequences for children."

Ms Aisling Reidy, director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, said a consistent factor in the referendum campaign had been the emergence of divergent voices from civil society calling for a No vote. Children's organisations, church groups, lobbyists from the legal and medical professions, and migrant bodies, both Irish and non-Irish, were among those who had spoken out against the referendum, she said.