Families of Irish prisoners abroad will raise their concerns about what they say is the increasingly hardline attitude of the British authorities towards the prisoners when they have a private meeting with President Mary McAleese today.
Growing concern has been expressed about moves to deport Irish prisoners when they have served their sentences, despite the fact that they may have spent most of their lives in Britain and have reared families there.
Concern has also been voiced about the indefinite detention of these prisoners after they have served their sentences, while the home office considers them for deportation.
It is not known how many Irish prisoners have been deported or are about to be deported, but the Irish Commission for Prisoners Overseas (ICPO) said the number of calls it received about deportation had "risen drastically" in recent months.
Fr Gerry McFlynn, director of the ICPO's London office, said the deportation issue had escalated in April after the then British home secretary Charles Clarke said that more than 1,000 foreign national prisoners who should have been considered for deportation had been released.
"Having made such a monumental mistake, they decided to go to the other extreme and hold all foreign nationals," he said. At that time, prime minister Tony Blair said any foreign nationals convicted of an imprisonable offence should be deported.
"It's now the case that all foreign nationals, including EU nationals, are now being detained well beyond their release date which technically is illegal," Fr McFlynn said. "It's causing a considerable amount of distress confusion and worry, not just to the inmates but to their families.
"We've met guys who were due to be released, their families were outside the prison gates waiting on them and they were told by a prison officer on the way out that they weren't going anywhere. They could be detained for two or three months."
He also warned that the blanket approach to deportation was in breach of the new EU Citizens Directive, signed into British law in April. It says that any EU citizen who has lived in the UK for 10 years should not be deported unless there were "imperative grounds of public security".
Fr McFlynn said there were about 900 Irish prisoners in British prisons, including Northern Irish prisoners with Irish nationality.
He said the Irish living in Britain were in a unique situation as many of them had never taken out British citizenship.The ICPO has encouraged people with relatives in prison abroad to contact the organisation. The e-mail address is icpo@iecon.ie or phone 01-5053000.
