Frank Fahey (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

The amendments are opposed. As the House is aware, the referendum in June was successfully carried with the support of more than 80% of the electorate. At the time, we published the Government's proposals on what legislation would be proposed in the event of the referendum being passed. The Government document made it clear that while it was committed to the basic principles of the draft, it would be disposed to propose and accept amendments which were considered to improve the final product consistent with the Government's policy on citizenship.

A central feature of the policy underpinning the Bill is that where Irish citizenship depends on the reckonable residence of a parent, all of the periods of reckonable residence must precede birth. If we deviate from that general principle, the problem will be that non-nationals will have no connection with Ireland and will have a continuing incentive to come to the State to have children and an increased incentive to claim asylum speculatively in pursuit of that goal, with which no Senator can argue.

It seems obvious that every asylum seeker hopes to be granted refugee status. If the Minister includes a provision which retrospectively confers automatic citizenship on the child of an asylum seeker who attains refugee status, then all pregnant asylum seekers will have a continuing incentive to come and have children here. This includes even the vast majority of asylum seekers who never attain refugee status. At the time of birth, they will retain the hope that they will be granted refugee status.

It is not the case that the children of asylum seekers who turn out to be refugees will be excluded from Irish citizenship forever. Section 16(g) of the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Acts, which will remain unchanged after this Bill, provides that the Minister may, in his or her absolute discretion, waive the normal conditions for naturalisation in certain circumstances, including where the applicant is a person who is a refugee within the meaning of the United Nations convention on the status of refugees.

It has been the general practice of the Minister and of his predecessors in office for many years to waive the normal residence condition of five years' legal residence and shorten it instead to three years from the date the refugee entered the State. It should be noted that this provision facilitates the naturalisation of children born abroad as well as future children born in Ireland. No fee is charged in respect of naturalisation applications from refugees. The regulations for fee exemption for refugees and stateless persons were introduced by former Minister for Justice, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, in 1993 and extended by former Minister, Nora Owen, to programme refugees in 1996.

In regard to the position of students, as the Minister pointed out on Committee Stage, the provisions in the Bill will introduce similar conditions for reckonable residence for citizenship by birth to those which currently apply for naturalisation purposes. Under the current provisions of section 16A, subsection (1) of the 1956 Act, temporary residence in the State for study or asylum purposes is excluded from reckonable residence for naturalisation purposes. The problem of students overstaying or seeking to extend artificially their permission to remain is well canvassed at this stage and is known to every Member of this House.

In April 2002, that highly respected international institution, the International Organisation for Migration, published a report which is intended to inform the development of Irish immigration policy with research on the policy and practice in other jurisdictions. That report highlighted the fact that it was internationally recognised that the downside of the export education industry was that of students overstaying and using the pretext of initial entry as a student as a de facto means of illegal migration. It also highlighted the fact that particular features of a country's citizenship laws can influence inward migration pressures.

Last month, the Minister for Education and Science published an interdepartmental report on the internationalisation of Irish education services. The report, which is designed to promote Irish education services abroad as an export product, also highlights the problem of overstaying. If we are to take this matter seriously, we must act in accordance with these widely recognised concerns. The Minister does not want a situation to arise where persons, who knew they were in the student category from the day they arrived, plan to have a child after three years in order to prolong their stay. If, by chance, they become doctors or nurses or whatever in the future, then their immigration status will change and they will be able to build up reckonable residence from that point. They will also be able to apply for citizenship for themselves and their children after five years reckonable residence in that case.

Therefore, we want our asylum seekers to come here as asylum seekers, not as citizenship seekers. We want students with extended stays here to be here for the quality of the Irish educational experience, not for the potential that birth on the island of Ireland might bring. This forms a comprehensive case and no "mature recollection" is necessary because the Minister and the Department have taken a very reasonable approach to this issue.

During my time as Minister of State with responsibility for labour affairs, I witnessed the significant problem we have with the numbers of young people who have been coming to this country in recent years under the pretext of wishing to become students and participate in Irish education, but having no intention of doing so. Thousands of such people are here illegally, which cannot be accepted or underwritten by legislation. For these reasons, I cannot accept these amendments.