Mr. Niall Burgess:

Before I answer that let me answer the other question Senator Daly asked about the significance of the cut-off date of 31 December. That is a firm cut-off date. One needs to have been in the US continuously from 31 December 2011 or earlier. That has always been envisaged in a Bill such as this. The idea is to prevent a surge of illegal immigrants in the period immediately beforehand. As Senator Daly was speaking I had a look through our analysis of the Bill and I do not see that point specifically addressed but I expect the cut-off date will be maintained and enforced once the Bill is passed into law and once that law is embodied in regulations.

We have a variety of figures for the numbers of undocumented Irish in the US but none of them are reliable. There have been estimates made in different parts of the US. There have been some estimates for New York. A number of factors make it difficult to get a firm fix, one being the mobility of undocumented around the US. Another is the seasonal dimension of flows to and from the US. We have always taken the figure of 50,000 or lower as the approximate figure but we do not have a finer sense of that. This is something we may come to but we work with a number of Irish centres in the US and those centres have a clear sense of the numbers in their immediate communities but one of the features of recent immigration to the US has been that many recent immigrants are far more diffused across the US. We have been working to support Irish networks, a network of Irish networks for recent immigrants across the US. That went very quickly, over the space of the last two or three years, from three or four networks in the major cities to 14 networks across the US. It is indicative of the spread of recent immigrants around the US.