'Our goal and our determination is to secure the passage of legislation that would enable the undocumented to regularise their status," Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern told a rally in Dublin last weekend.
Announcing the Government's decision to grant an extra €37,000 to those campaigning on the issue, Ahern told his audience that since assuming his post, he had insisted that "finding a resolution to the situation facing the undocumented be a key priority for my department".
He spoke of the stories of loneliness and separation he had heard from emigrants who lived in a "twilight world", parted from loved ones and enduring constant hardship in a country that depended on their presence.
The undocumented migrants in question are, of course, Irish-born people living in the United States, and the strength of purpose shown by Ahern towards their difficult plight draws on cross-party wells of sympathy. The Opposition parties as well as the Government earnestly support the campaign being run by the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, which organised last Saturday's meeting in Dublin.
But the campaign has shone light on an uncomfortable irony and to many eyes, the contradiction it suggests - calling for the legalisation of Irish workers in the US while denying it to non-EU workers in Ireland - is hard to justify.
Government Ministers dispute the parallel. In March last year, Dermot Ahern said that illegal Irish immigrants in the US were "entitled" to be in America, while last month Minister for Labour Tony Killeen reiterated the Government's contention that there is a "huge difference" between both groups.
The distinction is "nonsense", according to Prof Ronaldo Munck of Dublin City University, and is motivated by a sense that in some way Irish people have privileged access to the US due to historic links. "But there's no sociological difference whatsoever between the cohorts of Irish people who were undocumented in the US and the young people from other countries here," he says.
Attempts to regularise illegal immigrants in the US have trained attention on an issue that is preoccupying policymakers across Europe. Greater numbers of African immigrants are trying - and dying - to enter the EU by crossing the Mediterranean, and some governments, concerned to avert a public backlash, are increasingly keen to advertise their nativist credentials.
British home secretary John Reid has said that managing immigration is "the greatest challenge facing all European governments". The Dutch are questioning their long tradition of multiculturalism. Nicolas Sarkozy, the right's leading candidate in France's presidential election, takes pride in having discouraged asylum seekers and in stopping or expelling record numbers of would-be immigrants in 2006, when he was interior minister.
Sarkozy has said that if he becomes president, he will lobby for a European immigration policy based on "the rejection of mass regularisations", an allusion to the amnesties granted by Spain and Italy to their undocumented migrants in recent years.
Under Spain's amnesty of 2005, some 600,000 illegal immigrants were given work and residency permits once they showed they had a clean criminal record, could prove they had lived in the country for six months and had a six-month work contract. The Spanish government argued that the policy brought 90 per cent of the country's underground economy to the surface and, because the number of registered workers increased, it also gave a boost to social security payments. Moreover, health and education could be better planned in its aftermath.
But the amnesty drew criticism from some of Spain's neighbours, for while Spain and Italy have taken a liberal stance, other countries have become tougher. And because of the right of free movement of labour in the EU area, contradictory policies pose a problem: it makes little sense for France to crack down when migrants who have been legalised in Spain can cross the Pyrenees the day after their permit has been granted.
As a result, EU states have tried to agree a common immigration policy, with France, Italy and Spain particularly keen on increasing the union's competence in the area. But differences remain over proposals to share among EU states the cost of coping with increasing numbers of undocumented arrivals.
Northern European governments - including Ireland's - don't see why they should pay to help Spain, Italy and Malta to police their borders and deal with African migrants arriving in poor health.
Munck points out that although countries such as Spain and Italy were dealing with very large numbers of undocumented migrants, Ireland's contingent is relatively small. "But there is a duty of care argument . . . Are the laws around migration and visas totally logical, totally transparent, totally coherent? I don't think they are. Regulating doesn't necessarily cost - it can be beneficial. But we're in a situation now where it's seen as a concession to migrants."
The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment says it has no plans for a general amnesty for non-EU workers who find themselves undocumented for whatever reason.