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1.800+ candidaturas desde 2016 · clientes de 19 nacionalidades · no máximo 30 processos ao mesmo tempo
Ireland's descent route is the strongest EU passport a client with the right grandparent can claim without moving anywhere. It is also slow, paperwork-heavy at the margins, and closes one generation earlier than most people believe. Here's the working brief.
Irish citizenship by descent is the single most valuable descent route on the desk in 2026. The passport carries visa-free access to 180+ destinations, unrestricted EU right to live and work in twenty-six other member states, unrestricted right to live and work in the UK under the Common Travel Area, and full dual citizenship compatibility with US, Canadian, Australian, and most other passports our clients hold. The mechanism is administrative, the fee is small, and the cost of the paperwork is a few hundred euros plus a passport photo. What it is not is fast, and what it does not extend to is as far down the family tree as most people assume.
The rule that matters is section 7 of the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956, as amended. If a parent was an Irish citizen at your birth (whether born in Ireland or already registered in the Foreign Births Register), you are Irish at birth. Automatic. Full stop.
If a grandparent was born on the island of Ireland, you are entitled to register in the Foreign Births Register, and once registered you are Irish for all purposes with retroactive effect to the date of your registration. This is the workhorse rule and the one most HNWI files run through.
The great-grandparent case is where most files fall apart. You can only claim through a great-grandparent if your parent was already registered in the Foreign Births Register before you were born. If the parent registered after your birth, you are not eligible on that line. This one condition catches the majority of misplaced expectations, because the parent's registration date is the operative test, not the ancestor's citizenship at the time of your birth.
There is no residency requirement, no language requirement, no interview.
Application fee to enter the Foreign Births Register is EUR 278 for an adult, EUR 153 for a minor. Passport application after registration is around EUR 90. Total government cost is under EUR 400.
The real cost is documentation. Ireland requires the ancestor's Irish birth certificate (or FBR registration certificate), the intervening generations' full birth, marriage, and death certificates, apostilles or authentications for foreign-issued documents, and clean supporting ID. A typical US-side file with grandparent-in-Ireland comes in at four to eight certified documents plus passport copies. If a marriage certificate is missing (common for early 20th century emigration files) or if names diverge across sources (also common), the file gets kicked back for correction and adds months.
For most HNWI files we brief, the useful budget is USD 1,500 to 4,000 in professional fees to assemble and file the documentation cleanly. That is the price of avoiding the eighteen-month version of the wait.
The Department of Foreign Affairs publishes processing time estimates that have consistently been optimistic. Current real-world wall-clock for a Foreign Births Register application submitted in Q2 2026 is running eighteen to twenty-four months from receipt to registration certificate. Passport issuance after that is fast (four to eight weeks).
We tell clients to plan around two years from filing to passport in hand. Anyone who quotes a shorter timeline is quoting the theoretical target, not the observed reality.
The Common Travel Area agreement between Ireland and the UK gives Irish citizens the right to live and work in the UK without a visa, indefinitely, on the same footing as British citizens for most practical purposes (housing, healthcare, education, employment). For HNWI clients whose principal question about Brexit was whether they could still access the UK on a real settled basis, an Irish passport answers that question in one document.
Combined with EU freedom of movement across twenty-six other member states, an Irish passport gives one of the widest real-world settle-anywhere footprints of any citizenship in the world.
Ireland has no restriction on dual citizenship. The friction, if any, comes from the source-country side. US, Canadian, Australian, and UK passport-holders can register without any downside. Indian passport-holders, in principle, face the constitutional bar on dual citizenship, though the practical enforcement through OCI is well-established and most Indian-passport HNWI files manage this without issue. Chinese passport-holders face a harder rule and usually have to choose. This is a first-order question we ask on any intake.
Three things separate a two-year wait from a three-year one. First, the Irish-born ancestor's birth certificate has to be a certified copy from the General Register Office (GRO), not a family-held copy. GRO records for post-1864 births are usually straightforward to order online. Second, the chain of intervening records has to match names cleanly, or the file needs a solicitor's letter explaining variance (very common for Ellis Island name changes). Third, the identity documents at the applicant end have to include a full apostilled birth certificate and a current passport; a driver's license is not a substitute.
If your file has all three of these components ready before submission, the eighteen-to-twenty-four-month window is realistic. If any are missing, plan for closer to thirty months.
For a client whose Irish ancestor is a great-grandparent and whose parent was not registered before their birth, the descent route is closed. The alternatives are either a residency-then-naturalisation route in Ireland (five years of legal residence plus one year continuous immediately before application), or a different EU descent route (Germany, Poland, or in some files Portugal's residency-and-naturalise). None of these are equivalent to a straight descent claim in cost or speed, but they exist.
For a client with an Irish grandparent whose ancestor's records are lost, the alternative worth considering is a Foreign Births Register application supported by baptism records, census returns, and marriage records, which the Department accepts in cases of documented record loss. The paperwork is heavier but the outcome is the same.
If you have a grandparent-line file and want a written read on whether the paperwork stacks up cleanly and what your realistic timeline looks like, send the basics through our contact form. We'll come back the same week with the working checklist.