Citizenship Ceremonies
Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-16
============================================================

Colm Brophy (FG), Dublin South-West

To reassure the Senator, the only word that I do not like is "shoehorned". We are not shoehorning anybody; we are making sure that the experience that will be available to people in June is the exact experience that they would have got at the original ceremony. We intend to make it a memorable day.
I hear what he said about the online ceremonies. God forbid, if there were such a thing as a return of the pandemic or anything else like that again, I would certainly see the validity of that. In principle though, I refer him to the earlier point that I was making: that the importance of the ceremony in itself and the actual event - the day, and everything from the judge presiding, the Minister present, the Army band playing and people's friends and family around them - the totality of that in itself is as important in so many ways to the people participating as the process they are going through because it gives a significance to the day. I would be very loath to try and take that away. I do hear what the Senator says about looking at an online ceremony in extreme circumstances but, on balance, we should work towards making sure - as we have done - that people get an opportunity to experience that wonderful ceremony.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-04-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-16