The Immigration Bill is a "re-instatement of an old law on a temporary basis", the Minister for Justice has told the Dáil, but the Opposition accused him of "turning the nation into spies" and said his handling of the legislation was a "farce".
The controversial legislation, which will be concluded today, was drafted after the High Court last month described as unconstitutional ministerial orders controlling immigration because they were not made under primary legislation.
Mr McDowell said that "even as we speak" there were no effective provisions "to control the entry of non-nationals into the State nor their presence in the State".
He was particularly concerned about the "need to control the movement of people who are engaged in international terrorism, the capacity to stop them at entry points and monitor their behaviours in the State, and the capacity of the Garda to identify who is and is not here by demanding identification".
Fine Gael justice spokesman Mr John Deasy said, however, that the Bill was "nonsense" and its provisions "go way beyond what the High Court pointed to".
He claimed "we are being turned into a nation of spies" through a discriminatory provision making it "an offence for a non-national not to report to the Garda another non-national who is in co-habitation, but is not an offence for an Irish national to fail to report it".
Labour justice spokesman Mr Joe Costello said that "to lose a High Court argument once might be regarded as a misfortune. To lose the same argument again, six years later, looks like carelessness".
The Minister was re-introducing legislation that was a copy of emergency legislation introduced in Britain just before the first World War.
"It has long since been repealed and replaced in the United Kingdom, but astonishingly its dark and draconian provisions were considered by successive Irish governments to be a more than adequate substitute for an open and transparent Irish immigration law."
Mr Aengus Ó Snodaigh (SF, Dublin South-Central) said the legislation "is not an Immigration Bill but an anti-Immigration Bill. It should not have come before the House at all, and certainly not in the dictatorial and chaotic manner the Government has used to present it."
The Government will appeal the High Court judgment to the Supreme Court but needs legislation in place in the meantime.
Mr McDowell insisted the Bill was "designed to do little more than restore to statutory form the provision of immigration law in these matters, as they were thought to exist" until the High Court decision.
He rejected allegations that it was "draconian or punitive legislation", and said that "there has not been a Nazi-type immigration regime in Ireland". These laws had "been in place in large measure for the past 60 years. In that time, nobody has ever claimed that the law was Nazi jackboot-like and draconian."
One of the most publicised elements of the Bill relates to disability.
The Minister said the previous law was Victorian in its language and he will today introduce an amendment which "will impose on non-nationals coming to Ireland the same right of exclusion as currently exists for EU nationals. The section will use different language and I hope it does not cause offence to anybody."
