Applying from the U.K. or Europe?

[champers]

Hi there.

My son wishes to apply for Irish citizenship and subsequently, a passport through descent from my Irish born mother. Having checked on online on the dfe site, he is definitely eligible but my mother’s birth was never actually registered so we cannot obtain a birth certificate for her! I’ve wriiten to the HSE and they’ve checked and confirmed that this is the case. However, after my mother married my British father, she applied from UK citizenship and has an official certificate confirming her registration and also her Irish place of birth. She has also had 4 consecutive UK passports, all of which confirm her Irish birth town.

We have a definite paper trail of official documents showing direct descent between the three of us - except the wretched birth certificate. Will this be an insurmountable hurdle on my sons application?

I’ve tried ringing so many departments and embassies and either end up getting referred back to where I started or the dfe website. My son has started to joke that no one actually gets to speak to the Irish embassy and a decision made unless the planets are in perfect alignment!

Many thanks.

[harbrimar]

Hi Champers
I don’t have an answer unfortunately, but I am in a similar situation. Trying to obtain an Irish Passport by virtue of my Irish mother. Sadly, her birth was never registered, and she is no longer with us. I have full details of my Irish grandparents but unable to register my birth on the Foreign Births Register or apply for a Passport because of the absence of mum’s birth certificate. Tried to explain via email to the Irish Embassy in London, which is impossible as the webmail only accepts 250 characters! The only reply I received was a copy of the Irish Passport Application Form which I have not completed as without mum’s birth certificate it will fail. Have you made any progress?
Kind regards

[PasadenaTom]

BrexitEscapee discussed a similar situation in this thread

But here is a summary of what s/he did:

The only other thing of interest about my application is that my Grandfather's birth either wasn't officially registered, or that registration has been lost in the system. I therefore had to register his birth myself which meant I had to:

1. Get the General Records Office to carry out a search and provide an official 'no record found' certificate. (There's a fee for this - something like 20 Euros.)
2. Identify where/when my Grandad was baptised (using online church records which I found via familysearch.org This involved a lot of research and searching through online scans of old church baptism registers from the 1880s!
3. Write to the Parish priest and request a baptism certificate, providing the historical church baptism record I'd found online.
4. Send this baptism certificate off to the Civil Registration Service (in Roscommon) to request a Late Registration of his birth. This also required a notarised declaration form, marriage details of his parents and his death certificate.
5. Once his birth had been registered, I then had to apply to the General Records Office and purchase a long form copy of his birth certificate.
6. Job done - that was the key document I needed and I didn't have any problems or queries with my FBR application.

[champers]

Hello there, thank you so much for your replies. A year later I had virtually given up but read the responses and have now managed to collate all the relevant info to formally register my mothers birth. Fingers crossed. Now we’ll see how long it takes for the birth certificate to actually be registered.

[champers]

Just wondered if anyone else has any experience of this?

I’ve posted before that my son is applying for citizenship through my Irish born grandmother.

At present, he works in mainland Europe and when he tried to apply from the country he’s based in (EU member) he seemed to face a much more complex process. He would have needed to visit the Irish embassy in the capital city (more than 6 hours away) and the witnesses needed where much more specific and therefore less convenient to obtain endorsement from.

As he is still on the electoral roll and receives correspondence to his U.K. address, we’ve cheekily used that one as his usual one. We also have more contacts who qualify as witnesses to support his application. The whole thing seems far more straightforward if you are based in Britain, or is it my imagination?

[littlerr]

So I presume that you are talking about applying for FBR.

If you look at the FBR thread ireland/foreign-birth-registration-t277641.html,
you will see that it takes over a year to process this application at the moment. This seems to be regardless of the country of residence, although UK is amongst the slowest.

[BrexitEscapee]

I’ve posted before that my son is applying for citizenship through my Irish born grandmother.

If it's your grandmother, then it's his great grandmother, which doesn't qualify for FBR.

Sorry if I've misunderstood your situation, but here's the eligibility criteria from the DFA website:

"You are automatically an Irish citizen if one of your parents was an Irish citizen at the time of your birth, and was born on the island of Ireland. You don't need to apply to become an Irish citizen in this case.

If you were born outside of Ireland, you can become an Irish citizen if:

One of your grandparents was born in Ireland, or;
One of your parents was an Irish citizen at the time of your birth, even though they were not born in Ireland.
In these cases, you can become an Irish citizen through Foreign Birth Registration.

Once a person is entered onto the Foreign Births Register they are an Irish citizen and entitled to apply for an Irish passport."

[DanaMarie]

There is a path to citizenship through great grandparents but it sure seems a bit convoluted? Super handy chart is here. But I'm not sure your son qualifies?
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/m ... scent.html

[littlerr]

Reading the OP's other post, I think he/she was meant to say the child's grandmother, or his/her mother, so his/her son is eligible.

[CR001]

Reading the OP's other post, I think he/she was meant to say the child's grandmother, or his/her mother, so his/her son is eligible.

Topics now merged.

[champers]

Yes, sorry! I wasn’t being very clear.

It is my Irish born mother - my son’s grandmother.

We’ve also hit a problem in that my mother is 87 and so her supporting documents ie passport and driving licence have expired. I’m hoping that the authorities might take a pragmatic view on that one?