Airlines are still blocking some children returning home to Ireland from boarding

On 17 December 2024, Ankit Gupta’s wife, Shikha, called him from Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi.

They’d been vacationing in India, their country of birth, but Ankit had returned earlier alone.

Shikha told him that staff for Virgin Atlantic airline wouldn’t let their four-year-old daughter board a plane to the United Kingdom on their way back to Ireland.

“There was no issue for my spouse,” said Gupta recently.

But Shikha couldn’t travel back without their daughter. Airline staff had told them that the kid needed to show either an Irish Residence Permit (IRP) or Irish visa or a United Kingdom transit visa to fly, Ankit says.

Since May 2019, adult residents of Ireland don’t need a re-entry visa anymore, they can just show their IRPs to board flights back to the country. This policy later included kids, too.

And the Department of Justice doesn’t issue residence cards for kids who are residents of Ireland but who haven’t turned 16 yet.

This means these kids don’t have any paperwork to assure airline staff, who might not be up-to-date with the requirements, that they’re legally allowed to enter Ireland.

As a result, non-EU immigrants to Ireland for years have been reporting traumatic travel experiences, losing money and separation as airlines blocked their kids from boarding planes back home to Ireland. These problems persist.

Meanwhile, for airlines, the prospect of having to pay expensive fines to the Irish government every time they board someone who doesn’t have the right documents means some people are unfairly denied boarding. The new government has pledged to raise carrier fines.

Parents like Gupta say they’re asking for a permanent solution to end their travel hardships.

Over a month after Gupta got that call from his wife, he’s still fighting to reunite with his family. “I’m fighting for justice,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said there are no plans at the moment to change the current system for kids under 16 from outside the EU travelling to Ireland.

The government does not intend to start issuing IRPs for them, the spokesperson said, although it might issue re-entry visas for kids “in certain urgent, emergency, or extenuating circumstances”, the spokesperson said.

Indeed, when Fianna Fáil TD Dara Calleary raised the Guptas’ case in the Dáil, the response he got was that Shikha should apply to the local Irish embassy for a re-entry visa for her daughter. But Ankit says they’re still waiting to hear back from the embassy.

The department spokesperson also said it had informed all airlines about the rules, but travellers should check with their airline beforehand “to ensure that they are willing to accept children without re-entry visa’s on board”.

They can also show the notice on the department’s website explaining the rules to the airlines, the spokesperson said.

Meant to make life easier

Erasing the need for re-entry visas was meant to make life easier for non-EU immigrants, who used to spend time and money on re-entry visa applications to return to a country they already lived and worked in.

“The processing of these [re-entry visa] applications required applicants to submit their passports, which at times resulted in significant processing times, delays and other issues arising,” the Department of Justice spokesperson said.

For adults, it has made things easier. But for some children who don’t get immigration papers, it’s made travelling more difficult and scary.

Parikshit Anand says he’d be willing to pay more to get an IRP for his daughter.

Anand’s family have stopped vacationing abroad after being pulled aside while flying from India to Ireland with Air France back in 2022, he says.

He says when they finally managed to leave India, they had to relive the experience in France, where airline staff again said they should not be allowed to board. “They were asking in France, ‘How did they let you board in India?’”

It felt like they were travelling “illegally” even though that wasn’t the case at all, says Anand.

He still hears from other Indian citizens how they are denied boarding and lose money travelling with kids, and he doesn’t want to risk it, he said. “I’m really fearful about travelling.”

For his young daughter, the experience of being pulled aside while everyone else checked in and seamlessly passed through was deeply scarring, Anand said, recently, sitting outside Bestseller café on Dawson Street.

“She feels like there’s something wrong about her,” Anand said.

She kept asking if she’d be able to come back home and see her friends and classmates in Ireland again, said Anand.

Gupta, the man whose family are still stuck in New Delhi, says he wonders if these experiences amount to a breach of children’s rights enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

“I believe it is harassment of the child,” he said.

Seeking permanent solutions

A spokesperson for Virgin Atlantic said it’s aware of Gupta family’s case, but its staff are following guidelines issued by the United Kingdom’s Home Office.

They sent a document from the Home Office laying out the rules, which says people from a list of countries, including India, need a UK visa or “a valid common format residence permit issued by an EEA state” (like Ireland) to transit through the UK.

A spokesperson for the Home Office did not directly respond to a query asking them to confirm their visa rules for young children of non-EU residents in Ireland journeying through the United Kingdom.

The published Home Office guidelines say that people can travel back without transit visas if they arrive and depart by air, can show that they’ve booked a flight for their final destination and “hold the correct documents for their destination (e.g. a visa for that country if required)”.

But for Gupta’s daughter, Ireland doesn’t require a re-entry visa and doesn’t issue immigration papers. The spokesperson for Virgin Atlantic did not respond to a query asking about that.

Gupta has written to the Embassy of India in Ireland about his family’s predicament.

In response, he said, the embassy said it’s getting a ton of complaints like that from its citizens. “We have already brought this matter into the attention of Irish authorities,” they wrote.

In January 2024, former Minister for Justice Fine Gael’s Helen McEntee told the Dáil that after being contacted by the Indian embassy, immigration officials had reached out to all airlines to reiterate Ireland’s immigration rules for children.

“In light of the issues raised, my Department is reviewing the arrangements in place in this regard,” McEntee said.

A year on, a petition started on 15 January by Shashank Chakerwarti, a peace commissioner in Dublin, had over 900 signatures on Monday.

“We respectfully request the introduction of a simple residency confirmation letter in an electronic format for non-EU minors,” it says.

But for now, help does not seem to be on the way.

“The feeling we have is that if we go, we may not be able to come back without losing money or time or other things,” said Anand, the dad in Dublin who hasn’t travelled with his family since 2022.