THE Home Office is seeking assurances from the Department of Justice that if prisoners are transferred here they will not be released earlier than they would if they had remained in Britain.
Seven applications for repatriation were sent to Dublin by Britain's Home Office just before Christmas.
They are from five paramilitary and two other prisoners, and are the first to be processed since Ireland signed the European Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Prisoners last year.
The Home Office, however, has said that its policy on such transfer requests is to allow them only when satisfied that repatriation will not result in a substantial reduction in time to serve unless there are exceptional compassionate circumstances".
In a letter to a British Labour Party MP, Mr Max Madden, on December 29th, the Minister responsible for prisons, Ms Ann Widdecombe, said "Decisions on these cases cannot therefore be made until the Government of the Irish Republic has informed us of how they intend to continue to enforce the sentence."
The Department of Justice yesterday confirmed that the applications had been received, and said they were being dealt with urgently.
The British Government had asked for a statement regarding the continued enforcement of the sentences an assessment of the time the prisoners would spend in jail here confirmation that the prisoners involved are indeed Irish and a copy of the relevant, laws showing that offence for which they were imprisoned in Britain is an offence here also.
The British request is understood to arise from the different attitudes to early release of paramilitary prisoners since the ceasefires in the North. Thirty six such prisoners have been released in the Republic since January 1995 as a result of the ceasefires.
There have been no early releases in England and Wales, although in Northern Ireland last year the British Government reintroduced 50 per cent remission of sentence in Northern Ireland, resulting in the release of 88 prisoners.
The Government did not ratify the European Convention of the Transfer of Sentenced Prisoners during the IRA campaign, and only signed it last July. It came into effect three months later.
Mr Madden, a British Labour MP who has been calling for a more flexible attitude to prisoners since the ceasefires, said yesterday that he hoped the repatriation of Irish prisoners to the Republic would take place quickly.
"The British Government in general and the Home Secretary in particular must understand the importance of the prisoners to building support and confidence in the peace process throughout Ireland," he said.