The Minister for Justice is not considering an "amnesty" for some 10,500 non-EU immigrant parents of Irish citizens whose applications for residency here have been left in doubt by this week's Supreme Court judgment.
The court ruling means that non-national parents of children born in Ireland are not entitled to remain in the State by virtue of having an Irish citizen to care for.
The landmark decision last Thursday provoked calls for a moratorium or an "amnesty" for parents who are already in the system, whose applications for residency relate to children born on or after September 2001.
A spokesman for the Department of Justice said the Minister was not currently considering calls for such an amnesty. Mr McDowell has stressed that residency applications will be dealt with on a individual basis, on "grounds of consistent, fairness and respect for people's rights" and that mass deportations will not take place.
He yesterday rejected claims that the ruling means that there is now a two tier citizenship system, which children born to Irish nationals having better rights than those born to non-nationals, who can now be effectively deported.
He said if parents being deported decided to abandon their Irish citizen children in Ireland, he was sure the courts would oblige parents to take the child with them.
"The Irish State will obviously always care for any child who is abandoned by the child's parents but the Irish Constitution says that parents have inalienable and imprescriptable rights which are antecedent to positive law, in other words which are effectively natural law rights which can't be abrogated by any law or constitution to look after their children but those rights have co-relative duties attached to them," the Minister told RTÉ Radio's Today with Pat Kenny programme yesterday.
If parents abandoned the child, "It would be a crime and unlawful and a breach of the child's constitutional rights and natural law rights and I believe that the Irish courts would oblige parents in those circumstances to take the child with them, which it is their duty to do.
"You can't simply play blackmail with a child, you can't exploit a child and say OK if I can't stay here the child is staying here and I am abandoning my parental duties to a child." An abandoned child would become the responsibility of the health boards, becoming a ward of court.
An umbrella group of children's rights organisations yesterday repeated its call for a moratorium on any deportations.
Mr Raymond Dooley, the chief executive of the Children's Rights Alliance, said this should last "until a system has been put in place that will respect the rights of the child and will make sure that the Irish Government is respecting its obligations to children against the standards that the Government feels is appropriate."