A Romanian asylum-seeker and his wife and children are on hunger strike outside the Department of Justice in protest at the delay in giving them the right to stay in the State. Mr Puiu Macula (32), who arrived in Ireland in June 1997, said yesterday he withdrew his application for political asylum last February after his daughter, Karyn, had been born in Limerick.
He said he had been advised by a Department of Justice official that because of his Irish-born daughter he would be able to regularise his status in Ireland more quickly in this way. However, despite frequent requests and representations by local TDs from Co Clare, where he now lives, he has received no formal response from the Department.
Mr Macula and his wife, Luisa, started their hunger strike at lunchtime yesterday on the steps of the Department of Justice in St Stephen's Green in Dublin. They were accompanied by their five-year-old son, Puiu, a pupil at the Holy Family National School in Ennis, and 10-month-old Karyn.
Mr Macula said they had come to Ireland because as Hungarian gypsies they were a persecuted ethnic minority in Romania.
There are currently around 500 cases of asylum-seekers and other immigrants with Irish children waiting to hear whether they can remain in the State. The Department stopped issuing residence permits to such people over a year ago.
In the Fajujonu case in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that under the constitutional clause on the primacy of the family, Irish-born children, as Irish citizens, had the right to have the "company, care and parentage" of their foreign-born parents within the country.
The only way this right could be interfered with by the Government would be in the interest of the "common good and the protection of the State and its society".
The Department of Justice is currently understood to be seeking legal advice on its obligations under the Supreme Court's ruling.