Madam, - It has been our tradition in the Republic of Ireland since long before the Belfast Agreement to grant citizenship to everyone born here. We share this tradition with the US and I believe it's a good one.
Does this tradition lead to too many babies being born in Ireland? Hardly. We now have 16 births per 1,000 population each year. In the 1980s we had 10 per cent more than this and in the 1970s over 36 per cent more.
Does our membership of the EU require us to change this tradition? Certainly not. We have been members for over 30 years and I don't believe any other EU state has ever suggested that we should.
By ending this tradition in the way proposed by the Government, we would diminish the status of all foreign people living in Ireland, except for British people. Foreign people would all be forced to go through administrative procedures to try to prove a claim for their child and many would not succeed. We would also create an undesirable anomaly in our relations with our fellow European Union citizens. We would be treating Italians and Spaniards, for example, less favourably than Britons.
Why should a Spanish mother be denied Irish citizenship if she wanted it for her daughter, while an English mother could have it "automatically"? I don't believe we should be afraid to keep our traditional system. We are not going to be overrun by pregnant mothers coming here to "take advantage" of it. We shouldn't vote to diminish the traditional status of foreign people here. Let us remember that over the years many more Irish people were glad to secure US citizenship for their children as a birthright than foreign people here have gained Irish citizenship for their children. - Yours, etc.,
TOM SHEEDY, Seapark, Malahide, Co Dublin.
Madam, - In all the debate about non-national mothers in maternity hospitals in recent weeks, there has been one notable omission. Nobody has mentioned the fathers.
Obviously many of the babies born here to non-national mothers have Irish citizens as fathers. Thus they are entitled to Irish citizenship by descent, whether born in Ireland or not. This simple point undermines still further Mr McDowell's statistics on "abuse" of citizenship laws by non-national mothers.
It is becoming increasingly clear that he has no rational basis for the proposed referendum. Rather, it is a cheap political trick, designed to play on unjustified fears about immigration and to distract from the government's woeful failure to deliver on public services. Its attempt to introduce an unverifiable system of electronic voting was an incompetent and arrogant mistake. So too is this referendum. - Yours, etc.,
IVANA BACIK, Labour Party, Ely Place, Dublin 2.