"The minister is concerned to ensure that the integrity of Ireland's marriage laws is not abused for immigration purposes, and that the integrity of our immigration system is not circumvented by marriages, " a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice told the Sunday Tribune.

"The minister is looking at ways to limit scope for such abuses, " she added. McDowell is expected to introduce new measures in the upcoming Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill.

This week, the Sunday Tribune learned that up to 20,000 was offered to an Irish woman to marry a foreign national here in order to make his case for Irish citizenship stronger. The Department of Justice acknowledged that "it is extremely difficult to prove that persons marry for the convenience of the immigration circumstances of one of the parties."

Between 1997 and 2004, nearly 12,000 people were granted Irish citizenship based on their marriage to an existing Irish citizen. Only 29 applications were refused in the same period. "The majority of those refused would have been on the basis of doubts about whether the couple were actually living together as husband and wife, " the department spokeswoman said. She added that the Garda National Immigration Bureau "remain[s] very vigilant in monitoring and dealing with any attempts to abuse our immigration system."

There is currently no national database of different nationalities of couples marrying in Ireland. The Register for Births, Deaths and Marriages . . . a department within the HSE . . . only collects the information on an individual basis, so the numbers of various nationalities marrying here cannot be calculated.

Marriage to an Irish citizen does not automatically grant the non-Irish spouse citizenship. The process of entitlement to Irish citizenship through marriage, or "post-nuptial citizenship" was scrapped in the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act in 2001, which came into effect in November 2002.

Those who had married an Irish citizen prior to November 2002 were entitled to make a declaration of postnuptial citizenship up to November 2005. Some 8,000 applications for post-nuptial citizenship are currently being processed. While it is not now possible to make such a declaration, a foreignnational can apply for citizenship through naturalisation following a marriage.

In the past few years, there have been numerous cases of foreign nationals who were married or getting married to Irish women being issued with deportation orders.

In 2002, a Nigerian man, Sfemi Adesoji, was arrested minutes before marrying his 18-year-old Kildare bride Laura Behan. In 2004, a 27year-old Nigerian man, Akinwale Akininuolie, was arrested days before his marriage to Elaine Power from Ballyvolane in Cork. Both men were asylum seekers and subsequently won court retrievals against their deportation.