The UN High Commission for Refugees representative in Ireland has said that if there is an abuse of citizenship laws by asylum-seekers here, there should be a constructive debate on the issue.
Ms Pia Prutz Phiri's comments follow the death in childbirth last weekend of a Nigerian woman who had recently arrived in the country and claimed asylum.
The incident has highlighted concerns by the authorities that women are travelling to Ireland in advanced stages of pregnancy to give birth here, as this entitles their children to Irish citizenship.
The authorities say increasing numbers of people who use the asylum process to enter the State then go on to have children and seek residency status as the parents of Irish citizens, which is generally granted. In several cases due for hearing in the High Court next month, the authorities will seek to break the unique link that can allow asylum-seeking parents of children born here to stay, even if their original asylum claim fails.
Ms Prutz Phiri offered her condolences to the family of the dead woman, while cautioning against the tendency to draw links between asylum and citizenship.
"If it is realised now that some may indeed use the Irish citizenship laws to try to get a foothold into Ireland who are not refugees, then let's have a constructive debate about how this can be dealt with. But let's not paint the asylum issue and the Irish-born child issue as one and the same thing.
"The bottom line is that a refugee who has been forced out of her country is seeking to receive international protection, not to gain Irish citizenship. Let's keep these two issues where they are and deal with them."
Ms Prutz Phiri said it was not unusual for asylum-seekers to have children, particularly if they were waiting for up to two years for their cases to be processed, as has been the case in Ireland in recent years.
She also said that while some 30,000 people had claimed asylum in Ireland in the past decade, 3,598 had been recognised as refugees and allowed to remain permanently on that basis while many of the rest had left the State.
Last year around 2,400 people were granted permission to stay in Ireland because they had Irish-born children. "If everybody came here to have babies, I would have thought this last number would have been much higher, so let's keep this in perspective," she said.
"We shouldn't stigmatise children born to refugees because of the possibility of obtaining citizenship when in fact their parents are here to seek international protection and are fleeing for their lives."
Ms Prutz Phiri was speaking yesterday at the launch in Dublin of an EU-wide media information campaign to combat hostility towards asylum-seekers and highlight their positive contribution to society.
The campaign is a joint initiative by the UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which recently opened an office in Dublin and is assisting in the voluntary repatriation of asylum-seekers and irregular migrants.
Ms Diane Grammer, head of the IOM's UK and Ireland offices, said that as the asylum debate in Europe became increasingly polarised, there was growing evidence that refugees and asylum-seekers were frequent targets of prejudice.