Seanad Report: Up to 50,000 people living here and abroad could be affected by the Supreme Court decision on Irish citizenship rights, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr McDowell said.
The number of parents who had applied to stay here prior to and after the referendum could total 17,000. "You could be talking by the time you have siblings and all the rest of it brought into the equation and siblings abroad, about somewhere in the region of between 25,000 or 50,000 people".
There must be an expedited examination of all the people involved to see who they were, and whether they have more children outside Ireland and whether they were married or single.
The Minister said he could not just have some kind of legislative amnesty. However, he had indicated that there would be a common sense, decent and pragmatic approach to those people who had come here before the Supreme Court decision and people who had arrived since then. Where children had been brought up in schools with Irish friends, in humanity such families should not be broken up.
Once the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Bill had been passed, he would bring forward proposals to deal with the situation in which a great many people found themselves in a kind of limbo.
Dr Maurice Hayes (Ind), a nominee of the Taoiseach to the Upper House, said that he supported calls for some sort of amnesty for the non-national parents of children who had obtained Irish citizenship through birth in this country. But he agreed with Mr David Norris (Ind) and others in asking the Minister to deal as sympathetically as possible with those people who formed a quantifiable group. He believed that children who were entitled to Irish citizenship should have the benefit of the company of their parents.