Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

What I am trying to do with this provision is to mirror citizenship and nationality law. At present, the general rule is that if one is five years' resident in Ireland lawfully, one may apply for citizenship and naturalisation. Discounted from that is time spent in the asylum process prior to recognition and also time spent as students. The reason is that we want our asylum seekers to come here as asylum seekers, not as citizenship seekers and we want our students to come here as students, not as citizenship seekers. We want a simple system whereby the nature of their presence in Ireland, which is purely temporary, is recognised as such and is not compromised by an ulterior motive, which is to establish citizenship rights for any child born. This does not apply to anybody born until the date this Act becomes law. Everybody born in Ireland, North or South, regardless of the circumstances, until this Act is signed into law by the President and commenced, will be an Irish citizen.

Looking forward the situation will be different. In regard to asylum seeking there is a fairly rapid transformation in the time limits accompanying that process already in train. For example, what used to take a long period is taking a short period and there are prioritised countries where there is a high degree of asylum seeking which does not appear to be justified. Persons from those countries can have their status determined at first instance in approximately six weeks and an appeal can take approximately six weeks, following which one gets to the point of humanitarian leave to remain. The whole process can be reduced to three or four months. Under the old model, which is fading out, it took approximately two years to get around to people in the queue to deal with their cases. That will no longer be the case.