Eligibility of Irish and Commonwealth citizens to sit in the House of Lords

(a similar request is being sent to the Ministry of Justice)

Dear Sir or Madam,

I refer to the Lords Hansard of December 10, 2009, Column 1195:
"[Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead speaking]
I undertook to respond to the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of
Parkes, on Members of the House who are Commonwealth and Republic
of Ireland citizens. It appears that the Electoral Administration
Act 2006 may have inadvertently cast doubts on whether Commonwealth
and Republic of Ireland citizens were eligible for membership of
the House. That was clearly not Parliament's intention when passing
the Act. Some months ago, the Government were alerted to the
matter. Since then, we have undertaken discussions within
government to find a way to address it."

May I ask you to provide me with the following records:

1) The communication made to the Government "some months ago" which
"alerted it to the matter"
2) Any reply sent to the person or organization who sent the
communication referred to in 1)
3) All records of internal and cross-departmental discussion
(including memoranda and notes) following from the communication in
1)

Yours faithfully,

Michael Bimmler

Dear Foreign and Commonwealth Office,

I believe that you usually acknowledge Freedom of Information
requests quite promptly. I have not received any correspondence
from you on this request, however. Therefore I would like to
ascertain whether you have received the above captioned request.
Thank you for a brief confirmation.

Yours faithfully,

M Bimmler

Dear Mr Lowen,

thank you for your message. As you may be aware, a similar request
has been sent to the Ministry of Justice already and I await their
response.

For the record, may I ask you to confirm that the Foreign &
Commonwealth holds no information relevant to the request?

Yours sincerely,

Michael Bimmler