The new social welfare regime restricting benefits for immigrants from new EU member states after May 1st, will be applied equally to citizens of the existing 15 members, Government sources have confirmed.
Officials are working on the detail of amendments to the Social Welfare Bill designed to bring in these restrictions.
The officials are working to ensure that EU regulations demanding equality of treatment of nationals of all EU member states do not lead to the removal of certain rights from Irish citizens returning home after a period spent abroad.
There is concern that any new rule stating that an immigrant would have to be in Ireland for two years before receiving welfare benefits would also have to be applied to an Irish person unemployed abroad choosing to return home.
The Government said last night that officials were examining the detail of EU law and the social welfare code in Ireland and other EU member states to try to ensure Irish citizens did not lose any existing entitlements as a result of the planned changes.
The amendments will be made to the Social Welfare Bill which is to be enacted before Easter.
The Minister for Social Welfare, Ms Coughlan, yesterday stressed the planned measures were not aimed at people who wanted to come to Ireland to work but to "welfare tourists" who might think, as a result of restrictions in the UK and elsewhere, that it was "a soft option to come to Ireland to get welfare benefits". The fear was based partly on the fact that Ireland had a common travel area with the UK, she said on RTÉ's Morning Ireland programme.
She said the Government was examining whether to impose residency requirements, but would have to see how this would impact on Irish people and other EU citizens.
The Government had no problem with people who wanted to work in Ireland, she said. "What we are saying is that people who are inactive, the inactive group are not entitled to come here regardless of where they come from if they are burdening on the State and I have said last week that if we had an over burdening of the welfare system we'd have to do something about it." She indicated the common travel area with Britain meant the welfare regimes for accession state citizens would have to be similar in the UK and Ireland. A decision had not yet been taken on whether the Irish would impose a two-year bar on accession state citizens receiving welfare benefits, as is being imposed in the UK. The changes the Government would introduce "won't be alien" to those introduced in the UK.