Former Rep. Bruce Morrison and Denise Charlton, chief executive of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, held a press conference in Dublin last week to call on Irish people to vote against the proposed citizenship amendment to the Constitution.

And almost 50,000 Irish born citizens would agree.

The man behind the Morrison Visa program of a decade ago has lately become embroiled in the passionate debate on the nature of Irish citizenship, one that will be decided by Irish voters in a June 11 referendum.

Morrison, through his company, the Maryland-based Morrison Public Affairs Group, was already advising the Immigrant Council of Ireland before the referendum debate sprang up.

The ICI is an immigrant advocacy group and it opposes the government's bid to alter the Irish Constitution in a way that would make it far more difficult for non-Irish citizens to secure Irish citizenship for their children born in the state.

Not surprisingly, Morrison's view on the proposed amendment has been sought out by the Irish media. He has been interviewed a number of times and is this week busy penning op-ed pieces on the referendum for both the Irish Times and Irish Examiner newspapers.

"I'm making a nuisance of myself," Morrison joked in a phone interview. "But I think it is a terrible idea what they [the government] are doing. We've had five different explanations in the last month."

The former Connecticut congressman said that he was only speaking for himself but that he had also been working with the ICI in recent months in an attempt to put together a program of workable immigration policies that he thinks Ireland badly needs.

The Republic, largely due to the economic prosperity grounded in the Celtic Tiger, became a country of immigrants in the late 1990s after centuries of being seen as one of large-scale emigration.

And few dispute that Ireland now needs immigrant workers. Demographic studies indicate that Ireland is beginning to follow the rest of Western Europe with regard to falling birth rates and an aging population.

"In Ireland, figures from the Central Statistics Office confirm that the average Irish family is shrinking. Irish women are having children later in life, and they're having fewer of them," the Dublin-published Sunday Business Post reported last weekend.

"It's not an exaggeration, the demographic time bomb is very much here," economist Finola Kennedy told the paper.

It is against this backdrop that the upcoming referendum is set to take place.

The government, comprising of Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, does not see the referendum debate as being one on the rights or wrongs of actual immigration. Rather, it argues, it is an attempt to end what it sees as a blatant abuse of Irish citizenship law by non-Irish nationals.

Specifically, the government has pointed to the phenomenon of non-national women arriving in the Republic to give birth to children who then automatically become Irish citizens.

The government's proposed amendment states: "Notwithstanding any other provision of the Constitution, a person born in the island of Ireland which includes its islands and seas, and who does not have at the time of his or her birth at least one parent who is an Irish citizen, or entitled to be an Irish citizen, is not entitled to Irish citizenship or nationality, unless otherwise provided for by law."

Specifically, under the government's proposal, Irish citizenship would not be granted to a child unless one of its parents had been legally resident on the island of Ireland for three of the four years prior to its birth.

This proposal runs counter to the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution which states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

At the same time, recent changes in U.S. immigration law mean that non-legally resident parents of American born children cannot automatically claim U.S. citizenship, even though their children are deemed citizens. Morrison has indicated his support for this position.

The potential change to the Irish constitution, however, would be more restrictive in that it would remove the automatic right to citizenship for the child born in the state.

Morrison supports the American constitutional position with regard to how birth in the U.S. determines the U.S. nationality of the newborn, if not necessarily the parents.

"A lot of people seem to think that my opinions are worth listening to," Morrison said of his campaigning in Ireland.

The Irish government, he said, was "going off" on a non-issue while failing to set policies on inward immigration that Ireland now badly needed.

"They need to, but are not trying to, permanently assist immigrants," he said.

Should the referendum proposal be approved by Irish voters, and the latest opinion polls indicate that it will, Morrison believes such an outcome would be "a change in the historical position of the Irish State that would be so fundamental as to carry ramifications across the border into Northern Ireland.

"All that Ian Paisley needs to then say is that the Good Friday agreement is not written in stone and can be changed so as to meet the needs of the powerful," Morrison said.

The agreement includes previous changes to the Republic's constitutional position on national territory and citizenship that was intended to take account of the principle of consent enshrined in the accord.

Both the Irish and British governments have argued that the upcoming referendum has no implications for the agreement, no matter what the Irish electorate decides.

Morrison, however, describes as "an outrage" what the Irish government is hoping Irish voters will support.

"It's a 180-degree turn on the principle of citizenship by birthright. It's the triumph of ethnicity over geography and it's all wrong," he said.

"It's small-bore Irish politics, not big thinking about the future of Ireland."

Morrison, who fully supports the Irish government's right to combat illegal immigration in the broadest sense of the term, said the argument that the proposed amendment would close a specific "loophole" that was leading to abuse of Irish citizenship law was not valid.

Any loophole, he said, could be amended by appropriate legislation as opposed to changing the Constitution.

"The asylum-seeking situation is a mess and this is their [the government's] way of dealing with it. But in reality it deals with nothing," Morrison said.

Morrison has stated that the Irish government should tailor its immigration policy to attract the kind of skilled workers that the Irish economy needs now and in the future.

Such skilled immigrants needed to feel that they had a stake in Irish society.

"What you don't want is a situation like you have in Germany where third-generation descendents of Turkish guest workers are still not citizens," he said.

The Irish Times has reported that Morrison's criticism, given his status as a longtime friend of Ireland on Capitol Hill, has been "an embarrassment to the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr. [Michael] McDowell."

McDowell has been the government's prime political advocate of the proposed constitutional amendment.