Some 14,700 applications for naturalisation were refused between 1 January 2009 and 31 May 2013, according to the Minister for Justice.
But Minister Alan Shatter also confirmed that 63,900 had been approved for citizenship during the same period.
Minister Shatter was responding to a Dáil question from Richard Boyd Barrett TD, who had requested a breakdown of recent numbers of naturalisation applicants.
The minister gave a yearly breakdown of the 74,100 applications received since 1 January 2009 up till the end of May this year, which shows that 2012 saw the most applications with 19,900, compared to 18,300 in 2011 and 12,500 the year before.
During this period a total of 63,900 applications were approved, a figure that includes applications made before 2009.
Of the 14,700 applications refused or deemed ineligible, the 7,800 were refused in 2009 alone – compared to just 400 refused between 1 January and 31 May this year.
Four thousand of those refused in 2009 came from one particular section of Ireland’s immigrant population and were apparently submitted based on what the minister described as “inaccurate and misleading information circulated within their community regarding a supposed entitlement to Irish citizenship”. He did not provide further explanation.
However, the minister did stress his resolve to continue to decide on pending applications.
“Considerable resources were and continue to be deployed to process applications and more than 55,000 decisions on naturalisation applications have been made since I came into office,” he said. “It is my intention that we continue to build on this success this year and, in this regard, over 15,000 valid applications have been decided to date in 2013.”
Minister Shatter continued: “When I came into office in March 2011 one of my immediate priorities was to address the large backlog of citizenship applications for naturalisation pending a decision that had built up over several years.
“At that time there were approximately 22,000 applications awaiting decision, many of which had been waiting for two-to-three years or longer.”
