The Minister for Justice will introduce a range of measures to deal with immigration, residency and citizenship following the Yes vote in the citizenship referendum.
These will include dealing with the situation of the estimated 11,000 parents of Irish-born children, he told The Irish Times.
The Irish Nationality and Citizenship (Amendment) Bill has been sent to the Human Rights Commission for its comments, and there will be a period of about three months' consultation on this Bill before it is introduced in the Dáil. Mr McDowell said he was open to suggestions on amendments, particularly on the length of time necessary for a parent of an Irish-born child to live in Ireland for that child to qualify for citizenship.
When this Bill has been passed, he will move to regularise the situation of the families of Irish-born children, who have been in a legal limbo since the L and O Supreme Court decision, which found that the parents of Irish citizen children had no automatic right to live in Ireland.
"When the Bill has been passed, we can address the existing people in Ireland without feeling we are creating precedents."
He added that he would not necessarily deal with everyone in this position in the same way as all circumstances were not the same.
Mr McDowell will then turn to the drafting of an Immigration and Residency Bill, which will change the laws relating to immigration, allowing for economic migration into the State from non EU-nationals.
At the moment, this is regulated by the work-permit system, which requires employers to obtain work permits, which they retain, for such workers.
Speaking of the outlines of such a Bill, he said that he was against skilled employees being tied to a particular employer.
However, the situation was different with unskilled employees. "If they are free to take a job for a week and then disappear, it raises the question of why they are being brought in," he said.
"We go back to the European Economic Area and the preference we must give them. We must have some system for non-EEA immigrants." This Bill was likely to be introduced some time in 2005, he said.
Welcoming the outcome of the citizenship referendum, he said that without the change in the Constitution it was likely that the L and O decision would be challenged in Europe if the Chen decision was upheld by the full European Court of Justice.
Last month the Advocate General of that court found that the Chinese mother of an Irish citizen child born in Belfast had the right to live in the UK, provided she was not a burden on the state.
He rejected the suggestion that a significant proportion of those who voted Yes in the referendum had been motivated by a hostility towards immigrants.
Referring to an exit poll conducted by RTÉ, he said: "I am very, very suspicious of that exit poll," he said. "People might have said immigrant and meant refugee. They invented the categories after they had received the replies. It was not scientific."