Maintaining Citizenship

[Girlfriend]

Due to loss of job I have been forced to leave Ireland. I obtained citizenship through naturalisation last year and know that a condition of maintaining it is that if you have resided outside of Ireland for seven years and have not registered annually your intent to retain citizenship it may be revoked. The way I read this is that you have to register annually for each of the seven years? If this is the case what happens after seven years? Also, I read elsewhere on this board that you only have to register your intention a week before the seven year period is up. Does anybody have any knowledge of this procedure and exactly how it is supposed to work?