State services here have been "outstandingly more friendly and accommodating" to recent immigrants and asylum-seekers than almost any other European country "and we continue that tradition", the Taoiseach has told the Dáil.
Mr Ahern said he "has sympathy" for immigrant parents of Irish children facing deportation where the children were living in the State, but he warned that the legal system "cannot be changed in a loose unregulated way", because there were "many cases where the child has been born in Ireland and the parents have left immediately afterwards".
He told Socialist Party TD for Dublin West, Mr Joe Higgins: "It is a regular occurrence that people come here from various parts of the world to have their children and then return to their own countries.
"They come here merely to use the maternity services and to get citizenship."
Mr Ahern said it was "not such a simple matter" to grant Mr Higgins's request to give a "few thousand people the right of residency here".
However "in any policy changes, all of these issues will be considered but the system cannot be changed in a loose, unregulated way", he said.
Mr Higgins had appealed to the Taoiseach to grant residency to the non-Irish parents of Irish children who had lawfully applied to stay in the State before the Supreme Court judgment in February this year, which ruled that such parents did not have an automatic right to residency.
The Minister for Justice changed the rules in February and "stopped processing all applications not already determined, leaving some thousands of people in a twilight zone".
Mr Ahern said that the largest influx of staff into any area of the public service was the 150 additional staff recruited mainly this year to deal with the follow-up to the Supreme Court case.
Mr Higgins said: "The child born in the Irish stable is a citizen but the oxen have more security of tenure than their parents."
The parents were not allowed to work and could not therefore afford legal representation but if granted residency.
"This would give them the right to make a contribution to society, which they want to make, and to find the same security and future here that millions of our people found around the world."
