Thousands of immigrants who have claimed residency in the State as parents of Irish-born children will be given a chance to make fresh applications to apply to remain in Ireland permanently under new Government proposals.
Applicants who can prove their identity, show they have not left the State since the birth of their child and are of "good character" would receive favourable consideration.
Successful applicants would be required to co-operate with authorities and make efforts to become self-sufficient over a period of up to five years before being granted permanent residency. However, unlike successful refugee applicants, parents will not be entitled to bring other family members or children from abroad to live with them in the State.
The Cabinet is today expected to discuss these plans for dealing with a backlog of up to 17,000 residency claims by non-EU parents of citizen children. The applications have been in doubt since a Supreme Court ruling in January 2003. The court ruled that non-national parents were not entitled to remain in the State on the basis of having an Irish-born child.
The new application process for residency claims would start early next year.
Any applicant who provides false information or is of "bad character", such as applicants with criminal records, will have their applications rejected and face deportation.
Under the new system, successful applicants will be able to apply for citizenship after five years, in line with current naturalisation laws.
The plans for dealing with outstanding residency applications were circulated to Government Departments yesterday and are due to be discussed at Cabinet today.
There are no accurate figures on how many non-national parents are likely to apply under the new system.
There was a backlog of about 11,000 cases at the time of the Supreme Court cases. Some Government sources estimate this figure has since risen by a further 6,000.
It is understood that applicants under the proposed system may make fresh applications for residency, regardless of whether their children were born before or after the Supreme Court ruling.
Many of these residency claims were made by people who had initially sought asylum in the State, leading to claims that the asylum system was being abused.
This gave rise to the the citizenship referendum earlier this year, which resulted in a large majority of voters opting to end the automatic entitlement to citizenship of children born in Ireland to non-Irish parents.
The Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 2004 introduces a new general rule that a child born in Ireland of non-national parents is entitled to citizenship if one of the parents has lived lawfully in the State for at least three of the preceding four years before the birth.
Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn Féin have called for an amnesty on outstanding residency applications.
However, Mr McDowell has consistently resisted calls for an amnesty for parents whose residency applications are waiting to be processed.
At a Dáil committee last month, he said an amnesty would cause "chaos" and could lead to tens of thousands of extended family members of applicants arriving into the State.
He also said the backlog of applications would be dealt with in a "common sense, pragmatic and decent" manner once the legislation arising from the citizenship referendum was enacted.
Mr McDowell, however, said he could see the "moral force" of granting residency to a family whose children had been attending school here for several years and who were integrated into the community.