Legislation aimed at closing the loophole in immigration law resulting from a High Court judgment is expected to be introduced next week.
"We will bring in amending legislation and we want to get it right this time," the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, said yesterday.
Speaking at a meeting of EU justice ministers in Dublin, Mr McDowell said the Government had still not ruled out the possibility of appealing the decision to the Supreme Court.
In the High Court yesterday an Albanian-Kosovan man facing a charge of failing to satisfactorily produce registration documents was freed due to Thursday's landmark judgment which found parts of the immigration legislation unconstitutional.
The State did not oppose the man's release, and the judge said if the State could not stand over the legality of his detention he must be unconditionally freed. Legal sources predicted that many similar applications would be brought by other non-nationals.
The man had been in detention in Cloverhill Prison since the beginning of December. Gardaí working in the Immigration Bureau now feel themselves to be largely "redundant" following Thursday's ruling.
Members of the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) met staff from the Attorney General's office yesterday as well as members of the State's counsel involved in Thursday's court case. Further meetings will take place on Monday.
A senior source within the GNIB said that as the ruling meant gardaí could no longer demand of foreign nationals that they produce their registration card and passport, they could not track who was legally entitled to be in the State.
"It must be rectified in some way," he said. If a foreign national's registration papers are not up to date they are not entitled to work here.
Recent high-profile deportations such as those of foreign nationals working in lapdancing clubs would not have happened if the GNIB had not been able to demand production of registration papers, he said.
"We can still do registration and airport checks, but on the street, in various establishments where we suspect people are working illegally, we're redundant. We can ask people to produce their identification voluntarily, but they can tell us they will not, or do not want to. It's about the power to establish a person's status."
In Thursday's judgment Ms Justice Finlay Geoghegan found that Section 2 of the Immigration Act, 1999, a new law which was enacted by the Government with a view to making provisions of the Aliens Order, 1946, lawful was unconstitutional. Section 2.1 of the Immigration Act was not enacted within the framework for enacting laws as set out in the Constitution, she found.
The Oireachtas had sought, through Section 2.1, to give the Aliens Order statutory effect as if it was an Act of the Oireachtas but without the provisions of the order being actually contained in an Act of the Oireachtas. The Constitution constrained the Oireachtas procedurally from doing this.
The only provisions which might be treated as a "law" as defined by the Constitution were laws made by the Oireachtas such as provisions contained in a Bill passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas, signed by the President and promulgated into law.
She also declared unconstitutional provisions of the Aliens Order under which conditions may be placed by an immigration officer on aliens arriving here and provisions under which aliens are required to produce registration certificates, passports and other documents on demand from a Garda or immigration officer.
Man freed after ruling on immigration law: page 6
Editorial comment: page 15