Maybe time for pregnant pause on referendum

THERE is a problem. Nobody disputes that. A master of one of Dublin’s three maternity hospitals recently described the problem to me in an unflinching way.

This guy had no axe to grind, presented it solely in terms of the difficulties it presented for his staff. Women arrived into his hospital very late in pregnancy and sometimes in labour. How often? At that stage he said it was impossible to be precise but they were arriving on a daily basis. With no access to medical records or history, this put medical staff in an extremely difficult position. There had been a few grave situations, in which they faced a possible fatality.

There is a problem. But is this in fact the problem that has prompted Michael McDowell to sponsor a controversial referendum on citizenship? Certainly in early March, when he first announced his proposals to restrict citizenship rights, the minister seized on this particular situation to justify the referendum. The impression that went abroad among the public was that large numbers were arriving by taxi, boat and plane within a few days of giving birth. They left a few days later with their version of a "baby bond" an Irish passport that could be encashed at 18. However, from the start, the statistics which ministers were only too happy to parrot were highly misleading. They said that 24% of births in the Dublin hospitals were to non-national mothers. They forgot to qualify these figures by telling people that those non-nationals included women from Britain (677 last year) as well as women who were perfectly entitled to be here. Among those are Chinese and Filipino women, those with work permits, and asylum seekers established in Ireland for a number of years. It has been clear for some weeks now that the cohort of "citizen tourist" was much smaller. Yesterday's figures, however, took most observers by surprise. Instead of the 5,000 or so suggested by the 24% statistic, the true number is in the region of 550 for the three maternity hospitals. John Gormley had the best line on it; it would take 100 years for them to fill Lansdowne road to capacity.