The Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution Act 2004 (previously bill no. 15 of 2004) amended the Constitution of Ireland to limit the constitutional right to Irish citizenship of individuals born on the island of Ireland to the children of Irish citizens. It was approved by referendum on 11 June 2004 and signed into law on 24 June of the same year. It affected in part changes made to the Constitution by the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland which was passed as part of the Good Friday Agreement. Changes to the text A new Article 9.2 was inserted: The former Article 9.2 was renumbered as Article 9.3. Background Prior to 1999 the right to citizenship by reason of birth in Ireland existed in ordinary legislation. The only people who had a constitutional right to citizenship were those who were citizens of the Irish Free State when the constitution came into force. For those born after 1937 the Constitution stated that the "future acquisition and loss of Irish nationality and citizenship shall be determined in accordance with law". This changed in 1999 when as part of the Nineteenth Amendment the following clause was inserted into Article 2 of the Constitution: This provision was intended to ensure that people from Northern Ireland would not be deprived of Irish citizenship, but also created a constitutional right to citizenship by birth. Though immigration concerns did not feature much as an issue in the referendum campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment, it was given as an argument against in the Referendum Commission's leaflet: "The new Article 2 will give a constitutional right of citizenship to anyone born in Ireland. This will make it very difficult to change the laws on citizenship and it may prevent the enactment of necessary laws to regulate immigration." By 2002, it was reported that the number of births in Ireland's national maternity hospital had reached a 20-year high with 8,162 births, 15% of which were reported as being births to non-nationals. The Minister for Justice at the time Michael McDowell said that between 40% and 50% of non-EU nationals who give birth in Ireland were doing so to gain Irish citizenship for their children. In April 2004, An internal Department of Justice memo revealed that in August 2003, the Masters of Ireland's maternity hospitals had warned that pregnant women were arriving in Ireland from abroad with their "antenatal notes". In