Immigration and Naturalisation in Ireland


Today our dear readers, we will talk about immigrating to Ireland and about the final stage of becoming an Irish citizen, naturalisation. For those of you that do not know, naturalisation when a state officially recognises a foreigner as an official citizen of a country. Naturalisation involves a ceremony in which the person going through naturalisation has to take an oath of loyalty to the country before a supreme judge.

We decided to write this post straight after we took part in the ceremony which we described in the first paragraph and received an Irish certificate of naturalisation. There was no way we could not share with you our impressions and thoughts about the process we described above.

Firstly, we will describe to you our impressions about the ceremony in which we received the certificate.



The thing is that, few people can imagine the amount of people in Ireland that are currently applying for naturalisation. In fact, over one thousand people participated in the ceremony in which the certificate of naturalisation was given; the ceremony was held in a conference room in an area of Dublin called Dublin Docklands. All in all, there were four such ceremonies that day and in the end over four thousand people received a certificate of naturalisation.

In order to help you fully understand the scale of this project, we will note that this year, from January to June over 13,000 people received certificates of naturalisation. And since the new government came to power, during the course of about a year, 25,000 people became Irish citizens.

Given that the current population of Ireland is just 4.5 million people, we believe that this is quite a significant number. And when the readers of our blog write us letters about how they want to immigrate to immigrate to Ireland and of the impossibility of obtaining an Irish citizenship, we advise you to pay attention to the lines of this post where we talk about how many people receive certificates of naturalisation.



Anything is possible if you put your mind to it! However, we only specialise in finding people education in Ireland and cannot help you in matters of immigration. Although getting an education in Ireland can be the first step to immigrating here. Firstly, we will notify you of the general Irish immigration rules.

Ireland accepts immigrants of the following categories:

• Business immigration

• Immigration by work permit

• The immigration of a person who is married to an Irish citizen or a member of the European Union

• Immigration to achieve refugee status

• For a family reunion, where one of the family members has some sort of residence in Ireland or if they are a citizen of one of the countries in the European Union



Each of these categories has its own candidates and characteristics, which, moreover, are constantly changing. Unfortunately, only workers (specialising in professions connected to high-tech technologies, internet networks and computer technologies) that have been invited to Ireland can immigrate to this country using a work permit.

But if at least one family member manages to get a work permit, then the whole family have a realistic chance of immigrating to Ireland. This also concerns people who have a partner living in Ireland with an E.U passport.

There are significantly fewer positive cases involving people trying to obtain the status of a refugee in Ireland. For instance, in 2011 only 15% of the people seeking refuge in Ireland managed to receive refugee status.

Since the 1st of January 2005 the constitution of Irish citizenship by birth was changed. Now, children born to foreign parents living in this country can only apply for an Irish passport if their parents have been living in Ireland for over 3 years. Otherwise, children can apply for an Irish citizenship at the age of 18, regardless of the country they are currently living in.



You can also immigrate to Ireland if you marry an Irish citizen or a person with an E.U passport. This applies not only to people living in Ireland who are going to be married here but also to couples who met outside of their home countries. In our post ‘Visas in Ireland’ we already talked about these so called ‘marriage visas.’

Business ties between Ireland and Russia are growing at the moment. This means that the employees of these companies have a chance of immigrating to Ireland using a business visa. Also, individual investors may also apply for residence in Ireland. However, the amount that needs to be invested in such cases is thousands of Euros.

Of course, the process of immigrating to Ireland is fairly complex and may take up several years, but the most important thing to remember is that there are just many ways to achieve this goal as there are people who successfully achieved it. Like the old English proverb says, ‘When there’s a will, there’s a way.’