The Citizenship Bill, which sets out the citizenship rights of children born here to non-nationals, will be enacted before Christmas, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice has confirmed.
The Bill, to give effect to the result of the citizenship referendum held earlier this year, was published yesterday by the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell. It says a child may become an Irish citizen if at least one of its parents has been legally resident here for more than three years.
Groups which campaigned against the proposal in May raised immediate concerns that time spent in this State or Northern Ireland, as either a student or an asylum-seeker, could not be counted when calculating a person's period of residence here.
Ms Aisling Reidy, director of the Irish Council For Civil Liberties, said when applications for refugee status were approved, legally they had already been refugees before this was recognised by the State. "When a person is approved as a refugee, the State recognises your status under international law, it does not 'grant' it."
The Children's Rights Alliance said: "If a three-year residency requirement is to be adopted, it should apply equally to all children of non-Irish national parents."
Among the other main provisions of the Bill are that where one of its parents is a British citizen, a baby born on the island will be entitled to citizenship irrespective of the duration of stay of the parents, and that a baby born on the island to non-national parents, where one is on a diplomatic posting here, will no longer be entitled to citizenship
Mr McDowell said the Bill represented "another step towards the putting in place of a progressive legislative basis for all the State's dealings with non-nationals".
Groups said there was now no reason not to regularise the status of the estimated 11,000 non-EU parents of Irish children who applied for residency based on the birth of a child here, before the Supreme Court decided in January 2003 that people could not automatically claim Irish residency on this basis.
"There can be no precedent set by regularising these people. He should now do the decent thing," said Ms Sarah Benson, communications officer with the Campaign Against the Deportation of Irish Children.
The Labour Party's spokesman for European Affairs, Mr Ruairí Quinn, said in the interests of these families and their children, they "should be permitted to remain".
Worry was also expressed yesterday that a "second" class of child - i.e. non-Irish - would be created by this Bill. The Campaign against Deportation called on the Minister to include provisions in the Act to ensure no child resident in Ireland but not an Irish citizen could be denied any statutory entitlements provided to an Irish citizen child.
