Thousands of immigrants who have claimed residency here as parents of Irish citizens will have their transport costs subsidised by the Government if they volunteer to return to their native countries. Nuala Haughey, Social and Racial Affairs Correspondent, reports
The incentive is part of a package of new measures to deal with a backlog of some 11,000 outstanding residency claims by non-EU parents of citizen children.
The Government has sanctioned the scheme aimed at dispensing with the claims backlog in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court ruling last January that non-EU immigrants do not have a right to reside in Ireland solely because they are parents of Irish citizen children.
Processing of applications has been suspended for months, and the procedure for residency applications based solely on parentage of Irish citizens was terminated last February. The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, last night said outstanding claims would be handled on a case by case basis, with additional staff recruited from within the public service to process them.
Applicants who he intends to deport will be able to make representations to remain in Ireland on humanitarian grounds, including family and domestic circumstances and the length of time the Irish children have been living in the State. It had been the practice up until the Supreme Court ruling to grant residency rights to immigrants who parented a baby born in Ireland.
The majority of these claims were made by people who had initially sought asylum in the State, leading to concerns that the refugee system was being abused.
Mr McDowell has consistently resisted calls for an "amnesty" for parents whose residency applications were already pending when the Supreme Court ruling was made.
"I've always said I wouldn't make mass decisions one way or another. The humane thing to do is to decide what is humane in each individual case and not at the stroke of a pen affecting thousands of people," he told The Irish Times yesterday.
Under the new scheme people who volunteer to return to their native countries with their Irish citizen children could have their travel costs provided by the Minister. Mr McDowell said he would provide "whatever is reasonable" towards travel costs. This repatriation will be managed by the Dublin office of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
A total of 10,145 people who have already been granted leave to remain in the State as parents of Irish citizens are not affected by the new measures, and are free to seek annual renewal of their residency rights.
A telephone line has been set up by the Department to deal with inquiries from parents.