Tom Enright
Ceist:163 Mr. Enright asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs if an application for citizenship was received from persons (details supplied); if so, the date the application was received; and when the application will be processed.
Written Answers. - Citizenship Application Figures.
Tom Enright
Ceist:164 Mr. Enright asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs the present number of applications for Irish citizenship submitted prior to the end of December 1986 deadline when the new Act came into force; if he will give details of (a) the number of applications processed and approved prior to the end of December 1986 and (b) the number of individuals who applied and paid their application fee and who are still awaiting approval; whether he has had any discussions with the Minister for Justice about rectifying this serious problem; and if he will make a statement on the matter.
I propose to take Questions Nos. 163 and 164 together.
The Irish Citizenship and Nationality Act, 1956, provided that any person, one of whose grandparents was born in Ireland, was entitled to Irish citizenship subject to registration. In such a case, citizenship was deemed to date from 17 July 1956, the date of passage of the Act, or the person's date of birth, whichever was the later.
Where an applicant's citizenship took effect from the date of the Act, then any child of the applicant born after that date was in turn entitled to Irish citizenship, as the child of a person who was now deemed to have been an Irish citizen at the time of the child's birth, even if the parent had not actually been a citizen at the time.
The Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act, 1986, tightened these provisions. Under the new Act, citizenship does not take effect retrospectively but only from the date of registration — except for persons who registered during a grace period up to 31 December 1986, during which, as stipulated in Section 8 of the new Act, the provisions of the 1956 Act would still continue to apply. A consequence is that any child of a person who registered after the grace period is entitled to Irish citizenship only if born after the parent's registration.
During the grace period over 8,000 applications were received, most of them towards the end of the period. A large number of these involved combination applications from both grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Irish born persons, where registration of the latter was dependent on the prior registration of the former.
Additional staff resources were allocated to processing these applications in my Department and some 4,200 were dealt with before the grace period expired. This compares with 1,600 in 1985, the highest number of registrations previously dealt with in a single year. However, this left a balance of some 4,000 applications which could not be processed by the deadline of 31 December 1986. The advice of the then Attorney General was that any application not actually processed by that date fell outside the statutory grace period and could not therefore be dealt with under the provisions of the 1956 Act, without special amending legislation.
The possibility of introducing such amending legislation is being examined by the Minister for Justice, who replied to a Parliamentary Question on this issue on 2 May 1991.
As to the specific application to which the Deputy refers in his second question, I can confirm that the application was received by the Irish Consul in Johannesburg in November, 1986. It was forwarded shortly thereafter to the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin. I regret, however, that this application was among those which could not be processed before the deadline to which I have referred and it cannot now be dealt with unless there is amending legislation.