Amid delays with permit renewals, an immigrant doctor in Ireland can't travel to visit his seriously ill mother

In January, Rehman Faryal’s parents travelled to Ireland for a visit, he said, recently. 

Two weeks after they went back to their country of birth, his mum called. She had been diagnosed with advanced-stage breast cancer, said Faryal.

Faryal, who’s a hospital doctor, planned to go on leave to be by her side, he said.

At the same time, both Faryal and his wife were in the process of renewing their Irish Residence Permits (IRPs), a small card that gives people legal status to live and work here.

Faryal logged into the immigration office’s customer service portal, asking if it’s possible to speed up the renewal. If he left the country without a valid IRP, he wouldn’t be let back in.

The immigration office closed Faryal’s request on the portal, “without responding after 10 days”, he said.

He deferred his annual leave arrangement at work, sent another request via the portal and got a stock response, he said. “My mother is currently in chemotherapy,” said Faryal.

His wait for IRP renewal is nearing four months now, said Faryal. He’s not alone.

Processing backlogs has touched the lives of many immigrants since earlier this year.

At the moment, people renewing Stamp 4 immigration permissions – a long-term stamp with better rights and entitlements than short-term ones – like Faryal, say they’re still facing them, costing them jobs and taking away their freedom to travel, including for emergencies.

Meanwhile, stamp registrations and renewals brought in €79 million in revenue for the state in 2025, according to Department of Justice figures. Lots of people have to pay €300 to register or reactivate their stamps, though some are exempt depending on the basis of their immigration stamp.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said the city’s immigration office is still grappling with a mountain of both first-time stamp registration and renewal requests.

“And are exploring every avenue available to facilitate as many customers as possible and to increase processing capacity,” they said.

Life on hold

The spokesperson for the Department of Justice said it’s doing what it can to speed up and tackle the backlog. 

Its immigration office is now open seven days a week, and case processing should take six to eight weeks, or at least not longer than 16 weeks, they said.

It considers requests to prioritise applications for “extenuating” situations on a case-by-case basis, the spokesperson said.

It doesn’t have a breakdown of caseload by category available at hand, they said.

But, generally, 77,000 renewal applications are still pending, said Fine Gael's Colm Brophy TD, a junior minister at the Department of Justice, in response to a parliamentary question this month.

In the meantime, people waiting feel the impact in big or small ways. 

Anjali Parmar’s loan approval depends on a fresh Stamp 4 immigration permission, she said. “As the bank needs IRP,” she said.

She has already waited 10 weeks for a new residence permit card and had tried to check its progress by sending a query on the customer service portal, she said. But, “they just give me automated response”, she said. 

And she’s not hopeful, Parmar said. “With the current processing, I think it’s gonna take another two months.” 

Jędrzej Nowe’s partner is stuck in her country of birth, Turkey, where she’d travelled “to take care of her family”, he said recently. 

She needs to renew her permit while she waits for a decision on her citizenship application, said Nowe. “We thought it was a reasonable choice for her to leave,” he said.

They’d reckoned that Nowe would get the new IRP in the mail and post it via DHL so she could use it to re-enter the country, said Nowe. 

What they hadn’t envisioned, he said, was that it wouldn’t be coming any time soon.

They had tried to apply for an emergency re-entry visa, said Nowe. A visa is the thing that lets you get through border control and set foot into the country, but it doesn’t give you the right to live and work here.

The first request for a re-entry visa, he said, was closed without any explanation. On the second one, “they replied that this is not a sufficient reason to get a re-entry visa”, said Nowe.

Nowe’s partner, who had applied to renew on 6 March – the earliest time she could – is also a tech worker who was recently laid off by Meta and is set to join Google soon, he said. 

That also depends on her IRP coming through while the company’s offer still stands, said Nowe. 

“Her employment is basically hangs on the fact that her Stamp 4 is not being issued,” he said.

They had both noticed that the timeline for Stamp 4 reviews had been stretching out, which had them worried that they might have stopped working on them for some reason, said Nowe.

On Tuesday, Nowe texted to say it had progressed by just one day.

Others have also reported issues getting their IRPs in the post after they’ve been successfully processed.

An email from the immigration office to some applicants recently said it had “identified an issue where some recently approved [IRP] cards have not been successfully issued”. 

It has now resolved the glitch and reissued the permits, it said.

Brophy, the Fine Gael junior minister at the Department of Justice, recently told Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon that it outsources the IRP printing service to a “third-party provider”.

Sometimes there are delays in printing them because of its “necessary and routine system maintenance”, but they’re short-lived, he said.

It’s using an external supplier to free up civil servants so they can focus on processing actual applications, Brophy said. 

An IRP can also land at an old address if someone gets evicted or has to move homes in the midst of waiting for a new residence permit to come through, because at the moment the immigration office can take up to a month to update its files based on change-of-address requests.

With great (man)power

Nowe, the man whose partner can’t return from Turkey, looked for a TD in their area that he was sure didn’t hold anti-immigrant views, and contacted People Before Profit’s Richard Boyd Barrett, he said.  

Boyd Barrett is among a handful of TDs who have been bringing up the IRP processing backlogs with officials at the Department of Justice.

Fine Gael TD Colm Burke is one of them, too. 

By phone last week, Burke said bureaucratic immigration travails are something that his constituents grapple with all the time.

And it’s not just IRP processing delays, he said. It’s also difficult to muscle through work-permit bureaucracy, getting turned down for small mistakes and having to start over from scratch, said Burke.

As for IRP delays, Burke said the solution is to bulk up “manpower”. 

Earlier this month, Brophy, the Fine Gael junior minister at the Department of Justice, told Labour Party TD Eoghan Kenny that roughly 93 people work at its immigration registration office right now.

Staffing levels are kept under “ongoing review” in the face of growing demand on the department's immigration service delivery units “generally“, he said.

“It has to be more people assigned to it,” said Burke, the Fine Gael TD.