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SOME 4,600 people applied for Irish residency in the past two years on the grounds that their spouses were EU citizens from outside Ireland, including some 600 each from Nigeria and Pakistan, according to Department of Justice figures.

In a document presented to EU justice ministers in Brussels yesterday to show that Ireland faced a problem with "marriages of convenience", the Government pointed to the high rate of marriage between Latvians and immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. Ten per cent of all applications were from Latvians, and 50 per cent of them were married to Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi nationals, figures that were "so statistically abnormal that they cannot have occurred by chance".