Ireland

Nothing about a short visit to Ireland is decided in Brussels. Whether a visa is needed before travelling is decided by an order the Minister makes under section 17 of the Immigration Act 2004, and the order in force is the Immigration Act 2004 (Visas) Order 2014. Article 3(a) of it exempts nationals of the states listed in Schedule 1; article 4 requires a transit visa of nationals of the states listed in Schedule 5, which reaches people who never leave the airport. Both Schedules were replaced whole on 10 July 2024 and Schedule 1 has been cut three times since. Arrival is a second question with its own answer: a permission under section 4, which an immigration officer may give or refuse on twelve listed grounds, and on which that officer writes how long you may stay and whether you may work.

Working in Ireland without an employment permit is prohibited twice over by section 7 of the Employment Permits Act 2024: the foreign national may not enter the employment and the employer may not provide it. Section 8 lists who the prohibition does not reach, and the limb that matters most here is nationality - anyone entitled to work in the State under the European Union treaties is outside the Act entirely. For everyone else the 2024 Regulations set what the job must pay: 34,000 euro a year for a general employment permit in most employments, 38,000 for a critical skills permit, 64,000 for the critical skills employments on the wider list. And for a general permit the employer must first have advertised the job to Irish citizens and to the exempt classes, and be able to satisfy the Minister that it did.

Ireland has no statutory list of residence categories. Section 4(1) of the Immigration Act 2004 says an immigration officer may give a non-national a document authorising them to land or be in the State, and section 4(6) says the officer may attach to it such conditions as to duration of stay and engagement in employment, business or a profession as he or she may think fit. That is the whole machinery. The stamps a reader will be told to look for - Stamp 0 for a person of independent means, Stamp 2 for a student, Stamp 4 for someone who may work without a permit - are the Department's shorthand for conditions written under that subsection, not classes anyone enacted. A living from capital or a pension is enough to be considered under the Stamp 0 policy, and it is a permission without entitlement: no benefits, no public health service, and no work unless a letter says so.

Retiring to Ireland is a Stamp 0 permission, and the test for it is not in any instrument. Immigration Service Delivery states it on its own page: an individual income of 50,000 euro a year, plus access to a lump sum equal to, for example, the price of a residential dwelling in the State. The finances must be certified by an Irish accountancy firm, and investment sums are not normally measured - what counts is pension income or readily accessible funds. The permission must be applied for and granted before arrival, and a visa-required national then needs a D Reside visa on top of the approval letter. What it buys is a stay without entitlement: no State benefits, private medical insurance instead of the public system, and no work.

The Immigrant Investor Programme was Ireland's investment route, and it is shut. The Department's own closure FAQ says the Government agreed to close it to further applications from 15 February 2023, and gives the reason: the programme was introduced in 2012 when the struggling Irish economy needed investment, and concerns have since been expressed about investment programmes generally by the EU Commission, the Council of Europe and the OECD. What the programme asked for, while it was open, was a personal wealth of at least two million euro and an investment of at least one million for at least three years, in one of four options. The Department's main investment page still sets all of that out in the present tense and still gives an email address and a fee to pay. Two pages of one publisher, and they do not agree.

A student permission is a section 4 permission with study conditions written on it, which the Department calls Stamp 2. The conditions are the Department's: a full-time course on the Interim List of Eligible Programmes, casual work capped at twenty hours a week in term and forty in the holidays, no other business or trade, no benefits and no publicly funded services, and a maximum of seven years of study in the State. One consequence is not the Department's but the Oireachtas's, and it is the one that decides whether the years were worth anything: section 16A(1)(b) of the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956 says a period of residence under a section 4 permission given to enable a person to engage in a course of education or study is not reckoned when the residence for naturalisation is calculated. Seven years of lawful residence, none of them counting.

Irish descent is a real route and it runs through citizenship rather than residence. Section 7(1) of the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956 makes a person an Irish citizen from birth if either parent was an Irish citizen at the time. Section 7(3) is where the grandparent comes in: a person born outside the island of Ireland whose parent was also born outside it is not an Irish citizen under subsection (1) unless their birth is registered under section 27, in the foreign births register kept in the Department of Foreign Affairs. The proviso is the part that is routinely missed. Citizenship acquired by registration after 1 July 1986 commences only from the date of registration - so a parent who registers after their own child is born has not made that child Irish, and the chain stops there.

Marrying an Irish citizen does not give a right to live in Ireland. There is no statutory spouse class, because the Immigration Act 2004 has no classes: permission is section 4 discretion, and family reunification for the spouse of an Irish national is run on a published policy document rather than an instrument. What marriage does change is citizenship. Section 15A of the 1956 Act lets the Minister naturalise the spouse or civil partner of an Irish citizen on a shorter and differently measured residence: three years married and living together, one year's continuous residence in the island of Ireland immediately before the application, and two years' residence in the island of Ireland in the four years before that. Note where it says island of Ireland. Time in Northern Ireland counts for a spouse where it does not for anyone else.

Ireland is a member of the European Union, and the only free movement right that reaches it is the Union's own, transposed by the European Communities (Free Movement of Persons) Regulations 2015. Those Regulations are about Union citizens and their family members and nobody else: regulation 4(1) says a Union citizen with a valid identity card or passport may not be refused permission to enter except on two grounds, and regulation 6(3) gives a right to stay beyond three months to a Union citizen who works, is self-employed, has sufficient resources and sickness insurance, or is enrolled in a course. Five years of that becomes a permanent right under regulation 12. For a national of any state outside the Union, the European Economic Area and Switzerland, no treaty in this corpus changes anything about coming to Ireland.

Naturalisation in Ireland is a discretion and the Act says so in terms: upon receipt of an application the Minister may, in his or her absolute discretion, grant it, if satisfied of the conditions in section 15. Those conditions are full age, good character, one year's continuous residence in the State immediately before the application, a total of four years' residence in the State in the eight years before that period, an intention in good faith to continue to reside in the State, and a declaration of fidelity made at a citizenship ceremony. Five years of residence in nine, then, but not any five: section 16A strikes out time spent on a student permission and time spent unlawfully, and section 15C allows only 70 days of absence from the continuous year, with 30 more for exceptional circumstances the section itself defines.

Section 819 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 sets two tests and either one makes a person resident for a year of assessment: 183 days or more in the year, or 280 days or more taken across that year and the one before it. The second test has a floor under it - a year in which a person is here for 30 days or fewer is not a year of residence and those days do not count towards the 280 either. What a day means was changed after the Act was passed and the Irish Statute Book does not show it: section 15 of the Finance (No. 2) Act 2008 replaced subsection (4) so that from the year of assessment 2009 a person is present for a day if present at any time during that day. The text the Statute Book still serves says at the end of the day, and that has not been the law since 2008.

Two instruments decide this and they pull in opposite directions. The European Union (Payment Accounts) Regulations 2016 give a consumer who is legally resident in the European Union a right to open and use a payment account with basic features, regardless of place of residence, and forbid a credit institution to discriminate by nationality when anyone applies for a payment account at all. The Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Act 2010 goes the other way: section 33 requires the bank to identify and verify the customer before the relationship starts, on documents from a government source or another source it has reasonable grounds to rely on, and section 38A adds six further measures for a customer established or residing in a high-risk third country - a category defined by reference to a list the European Commission draws up, not the bank and not the Oireachtas.

Access to the Irish public health service is not a question of citizenship or of immigration status. It turns on one phrase inserted into the Health Act 1970 in 1991: ordinarily resident in the State. Section 45 gives full eligibility - the medical card - to a person in one of two categories who is ordinarily resident; section 46 gives limited eligibility to any person ordinarily resident who is without full eligibility. Everyone else has neither. The Act does not define the phrase. Instead section 47A empowers the Minister to issue guidelines to the Health Service Executive and to appeal officers to assist them in deciding whether a person is ordinarily resident, which means the test that decides eligibility is published by a Minister rather than enacted by the Oireachtas.

Ireland does not recognise foreign driving licences in general. Section 23A of the Road Traffic Act 1961 lets the Minister declare by order that licences issued by a particular state are recognised for the purpose of exchange, and a licence that is not covered by such an order cannot be exchanged at all - the holder sits the Irish theory test and the Irish driving test like a new driver. The general order is the Road Traffic (Recognition of Foreign Driving Licences) Order 2007, which covers every Member State and twelve named others: Australia, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Iceland, the Isle of Man, Japan, Jersey, Liechtenstein, Norway, South Africa, South Korea and Switzerland. Later orders add states one at a time, and Canada arrives not as a country but as a stack of provinces.

What a person brings when they move to Ireland is governed by a Union regulation that applies directly in every member state. Article 3 of Council Regulation (EC) No 1186/2009 admits personal property free of import duties where a natural person transfers their normal place of residence from a third country into the customs territory. Four conditions do the work. The goods must have been owned, and if durable used, at the old residence for at least six months; they must be for the same use at the new one; the person must have lived outside the customs territory for a continuous twelve months; and the goods must be entered for free circulation within twelve months of the move. Alcohol, tobacco, commercial vehicles and the tools of a trade other than portable instruments get no relief at all.