All members of sovereign parliaments of Commonwealth countries have a legal entitlement, if they are elected/appointed to sit in a House ofParliament of the United Kingdom, to take up their seat in the British Parliament. This is a privilege extended to Commonwealth countries under British law. Notwithstanding that this privilege in favour of Commonwealth countries for many years, no member of a Commonwealth parliament has ever been a member of the United Kingdom parliament as well. Ireland withdrew from the British Commonwealth of Nations in April 1949. With its departure from the Commonwealth, Ireland lost the privilege extended to members of Commonwealth parliaments. Even though the United Kingdom passed the Ireland Act 1949, providing that Ireland would not be treated as a "foreign country" for the purposes of British law, the privilege Ireland had lost was not restored to it. As such, an anomaly between the way Ireland was treated and the way Commonwealth countries were treated arose. Nevertheless, the issue attracted no attention over the years.
Background to why the Commonwealth privilege was extended to Ireland
Ireland and the United Kingdom concluded the Belfast Agreement concerning the constitutional position of Northern Ireland in 1998. Among the matters agreed in that Agreement were that Ireland would remove its constitutional claim to the territory of Northern Ireland. With effect from 2 December 1999, this Irish claim was dropped. The Government of the United Kingdom moved quickly to remove the aforementioned anomaly and introduced legislation to extend the privilege of members of the sovereign Irish parliament to also, if elected/appointed, take up seats in the parliament of the United Kingdom.
Heated parliamentary debate
The changes proposed under the Disqualification Bill 2000 were the subject of heated debate in the British House of Lords. The Government minister stated that:
The constitutional changes made by the Irish Government are historic and irreversible. They represent the giving up of what has always been regarded in Ireland as very important constitutional provisions....When the Irish constitutional changes took effect on 2nd December, we believed it only right to follow those changes by removing in this Bill one of the last distinctions made in domestic legislation between Ireland and those other countries with which we have an equally warm and special relationship through the Commonwealth.
Unionist Members first proposed an amendment to the bill concerning the name used for the Irish state. They argued that the term "the Republic of Ireland" should be used, and not "Ireland". However, the Government did not accept this, stating :
he term "Ireland" is used correctly, is unambiguous and is in accordance with established practice. Since the conclusion of the British-Irish agreement in 1998 it has been the practice of both the British Government and Irish Government to refer to "Ireland" rather than "the Republic of Ireland" when the reference is in an international context. To accept the amendments would make the drafting of the Bill inconsistent with the practice of the Government in other legislation. Therefore, we oppose the amendment moved....
Next, the substance of the bill was debated at length. Opposition peers argued that permitting a member of the parliament of Ireland to simultaneously serve as a member of the parliament of the United Kingdom left room for a dangerous conflict of interest to emerge. They argued that this law would benefit only Sinn Féin and that that party might use the new law to permit it to send its Members of Parliament to sit in Dáil Éireann and speak for their constituents in the United Kingdom in Dáil Éireann and that "would be huge step towards a United Ireland by stealth". These arguments were not accepted. However, the arguments that Irish government ministers and chairmen of committees of the Irish parliament should not be permitted to serve as ministers in the United Kingdom were accepted.
