Tue 01 February 2022:
Ireland’s justice minister Helen McEntee has launched a new scheme that could allow undocumented migrants residing in the country to gain full legal status.
The amnesty scheme will be available to adults who have lived in Ireland for four years or children who have been residing there for three years. This timeframe is reduced to two years for asylum seekers.
“I firmly believe this scheme will improve the lives of thousands of people across the country who contribute to our society, enrich our culture and work in our economy but unfortunately still live in the legal shadows,” McEntee said.
“People come to Ireland to make a better life for themselves and their families, and they can find themselves undocumented for many reasons”, she added.
“This scheme will provide an opportunity for those who meet its criteria to remain and reside in the State and to become part of mainstream Irish society rather than living on its margins.”
There could be up to 17,000 people living undocumented in Ireland including up to 3,000 children, according to the Department of Justice.
“Every individual or every application be it a family or otherwise will have to go through a vetting process,” she said on RTÉ Radio One’s Morning Ireland.
“So if it transpires that you have a previous criminal conviction or if there is a reason that the gardaí have laid out that you shouldn’t be successful, well of course the Minister for Justice has to take that into account but simply by having a deportation order against you that doesn’t prevent you from applying.”
The Justice Minister said the department wants to be as “reasonable as possible” and those that have travelled abroad in the last four years will not be automatically be disqualified either.
She added that there is an appeals process and the person looking at the appeal will not have seen the person’s original application.
“Irrespective of what kind of visa you had in the past, once you can show you have had a four-year period of undocumentation… if someone had to travel home we want to be as responsible as possible and understanding peoples situations that it’s never straightforward,” she said.
“We can all picture people that we know who are in this very situation abroad and we have to think what would we want for them and how would we want them to be treated.”
“Anybody who has been living in this country in an undocumented way, so that can range from someone who came in on a particular type of visa that they haven’t kept, or someone that has never had a regularised status they can now apply to this scheme which will allow them to legally access the workforce and potentially in years to come to go through to process to become Irish citizens,” Minister McEntee said.
“There are thousands of people who currently live in this country as part of our community, many of them are working and paying taxes and their children are in our schools, we might not even know that they are in an undocumented way but they have been living with a cloud hanging over them, this will allow them to get on with their lives.”
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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