Frequently asked questions

Foreign Birth Registration (FBR) is processed by Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs, and in recent years applications have typically taken around 9 months to 2 years from submission to approval, depending on application volumes and whether your documents are complete. Applications with missing or inconsistent documents are the most common cause of delay, which is why careful preparation up front matters so much.

Once your citizenship is confirmed, either automatically by descent or on the date your Foreign Birth Registration is entered, a first-time Irish passport application generally takes around 6 to 10 weeks through Passport Online. Straightforward renewals are usually faster. Timelines fluctuate seasonally, with spring and summer being the busiest periods.

There is no paid fast-track for Foreign Birth Registration, but you control the biggest variable: document quality. A complete, correctly certified application avoids the back-and-forth that adds months. The Department does consider expedite requests in limited urgent circumstances (for example, imminent travel for a family emergency), but these are the exception. Our document research and application preparation services are designed to get it right the first time.

It depends on your path. If you were born on the island of Ireland (on or before 31 December 2004), or born abroad to a parent who was born on the island, you are an Irish citizen automatically, with no registration needed. If you claim through a grandparent or great-grandparent, you become an Irish citizen on the date your name is entered in the Foreign Births Register, not retroactively. That date matters if you plan to pass citizenship on to your own children.

Sometimes, but only if the chain was kept alive. If your great-grandparent was born on the island of Ireland, you are entitled to register in the Foreign Births Register only if your parent had already registered in the FBR before you were born. If your parent registered between 1956 and 1986, or (for those born after 1986) before your birth, your claim is valid. If your parent never registered, the great-grandparent link alone is unfortunately not enough.

If your parent is still living, they may be able to register now, because their own claim through their grandparent doesn't expire. Their registration won't help you directly (it needed to happen before your birth), but it can preserve the line for your future children: any child born after your own FBR registration can claim through you. Separately, you may qualify for Irish citizenship through naturalisation, particularly if you have Irish associations. We can review your family's specific timeline in a free eligibility check.

You'll need their Irish civil birth record (civil registration began in 1864) or a church baptismal record for earlier births, plus the marriage and birth records that connect each generation down to you. Irish records can be fragmented: spelling variations, townland names, and missing registers are common. Genealogical and document research is the heart of what we do, and we know where to look when the obvious sources come up empty.

Yes. Ireland fully permits dual and multiple citizenship. Claiming Irish citizenship by descent does not require you to give up your current nationality, and Irish law places no restrictions on holding several passports.

No. The United States permits dual citizenship, and acquiring Irish citizenship by descent is not an expatriating act: you keep your U.S. citizenship, passport, and voting rights. U.S. citizens should remember to always enter and leave the United States on their U.S. passport, and that U.S. tax filing obligations continue regardless of where you live. The same broad picture applies in Canada, the UK, and Australia, though we always suggest confirming your own country's rules.

Irish citizenship makes you an EU citizen, with the right to live, work, study, and retire in any of the 27 EU member states plus the freedom to remain in the UK under the Common Travel Area. It also gives you one of the world's strongest passports for visa-free travel, and it passes to future generations: children born after you are registered can claim citizenship through you.

If you are an Irish citizen born abroad who claimed through the Foreign Births Register, your children are entitled to register only if they were born after your registration date. Children born before you registered generally cannot claim through you. This timing rule is the single most common reason families register sooner rather than later, even before any move to Ireland or Europe is planned.