Facing delays renewing his residence permit, a hospital doctor is stuck unable to work

Dr Alaa Boukalfouni spends his days at home waiting and wondering how much longer he has to wait, he said recently.

And it’s killing him, he said. He’s not used to staying out of work, said Boukalfouni, sitting at Mooz café in Stoneybatter, recently. 

Boukalfouni, a maternity doctor at Rotunda Hospital, is a Lebanese citizen with a pending Irish citizenship application filed back in October 2025. 

Since moving here in the summer of 2020, he has lived and worked on an immigration permission granted to spouses of EU citizens. His wife is a Lithuanian citizen, he said.

His residency permit was due to run out in late June. In April, he had applied to renew it, he said.

On 7 June, the city’s immigration office rejected his application, Boukalfouni said. It said he hadn’t submitted a letter proving he’s eligible for a fresh immigration stamp, he said.

“I'm still married to the same partner. We have two children. They've been born here,” Boukalfouni said. 

He got what they’d asked for, and re-filed the application, anyway, Boukalfouni said. “And since then, it’s been pending,” he said.

As renewing his status has stretched beyond the 12 weeks that the Department of Justice allows applicants to work on an expired permit, he couldn’t go back to work to tend to his patients, he said.

His family in Lebanon – where southern parts remain the target of Israel's bombardments – also relied on his income, said Boukalfouni 

This year, the city’s immigration office has struggled to process stamp renewal applications in good time, leaving some unable to work and frustrated. 

Some, like Shashank Chakerwarti, a peace commissioner in Dublin, have been submitting complaints to the Ombudsman over those delays. 

But adjudicating immigration, citizenship and visa disputes currently falls outside of its ambit of influence. 

Looking into grievances against the International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS) from residents of its asylum shelters is the closest it can get to hearing out immigration-y problems. 

It's something the Ombudsman himself has called for government to change. Recently, the Ombudsman asked for its remit to expand, so it can examine immigration-related complaints. 

In the past 12 months, said a spokesperson for the Ombudsman office, it has received some 200 complaints about things like “decisions made about asylum, citizenship and visa applications”. 

Let us help

On 22 September, Ger Deering, the current Ombudsman, told the Dáil’s Joint Committee on Public Petitions and the Ombudsman that “some people experience significant difficulties engaging with the Department of Justice”.

Or they don’t hear back from them on important matters, he said.

The current restriction in the law means the Ombudsman office can’t give a shot at being heard to lots of those people who are giving back to the country in different ways, he said.

“Many of these people make a major contribution to our society, including through their work and tax contributions, yet they are still denied access to the services of the Ombudsman,” Deering said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform – which can greenlight the Ombudsman’s request for expanding its remit – said doing so was not planned in the current programme for government. 

Though even if it was pledged, it might not have actually happened. 

It has been a decade since the Department of Justice declared that prisoners could file complaints to his office, said Deering, the current Ombudsman, at the Dáil, recently.

“Ten years and many meetings later, it is frustrating and unacceptable that the Office of the Ombudsman is still prohibited from dealing with complaints from prisoners,” he said. 

Lost in bureaucracy 

Immigration-related decisions can be internally appealed, judicially reviewed or handled in step with the Department of Justice’s customer complaints procedure, said the spokesperson for the Department of Public Expenditure. 

Not everyone can afford a lawyer or find a pro-bono one to take an immigration case to the High Court. 

Legal aid is not offered for immigration cases outside of asylum claims. And for the latter it doesn’t cover judicial reviews.

Boukalfouni, the OB/GYN at Rotunda hospital, said he’d felt overwhelmed navigating the renewal bureaucracy. He couldn't quite map out the right route.

Like he wasn’t sure if he needed to simply renew his stamp or fill out an EU Treaty Rights 3 (EUTR3) permission form.

That involves applying for permanent residency after five years of living here with an EU citizen spouse.

Wendy Lyon, partner and immigration solicitor at Abbey Law, said that is the route that Boukalfouni has to take, instead of trying to renew the previous five-year stamp.

And under EU law, he is allowed to work on a temporary permission while his application is pending, she said.

So, technically, Boukalfouni should not be out of work right now. Last week, Boukalfouni said in an email that he was going to fill out the EUTR3 form.

He had been querying the immigration office’s customer service portal, but his questions went unanswered, he said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said it doesn’t speak to specific cases. 

But generally, family members of EU citizens who are from outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) and have lived here for five years or longer can file an EUTR3 application, they said.

It’s doing whatever it can to process cases as fast as possible, the spokesperson said.

But a myriad of reasons, like caseload size, complexity of some applications and incomplete information, stymie its efforts, they said.

Last Wednesday, Boukalfouni pulled up the immigration office’s online immigration registration and renewal service on his phone and signed in. 

It shows a pending renewal case and a citizenship application. 

Despite being filed in October 2025, the status of his citizenship application has not progressed beyond “received”, it showed.

The Department of Justice is yet to decide on some 2,930 citizenship applications filed between 2020 to 2023, according to its latest figures.

Damned if you do

Back in March, Chakerwarti, the peace commissioner in Dublin, filed a complaint against the Department of Justice over its processing delays.

At the time, he didn’t know that the Ombudsman couldn’t examine cases like that, he said.

In June, the Ombudsman wrote to say it didn't have any influence over the Department of Justice’s actions in immigration and naturalisation cases. 

It apologised and closed the case, an email showed. “I was truly disappointed,” Chakerwarti said.

Meanwhile, Boukalfouni, the OB/GYN doctor, said his wife had been made redundant last year. She has been taking care of their baby for the past 10 months, he said. 

With him out of work, too, they have no source of income at the moment, he said.

And he worries about his family in Lebanon who rely on him and his brother who lives in Italy, to get by, Boukalfouni said.

He’d been paying for his sister’s education, Boukalfouni said. “Lebanon has been for the last four years … yeah, it was war. It's chaos,” he said.

In late September, Sinn Féin TD Paul Donnelly asked Colm Brophy TD,  a junior Fine Gael minister at the Department of Justice, how his department expects people to make a living if they are left unable to work over bureaucratic delays.

“This is not merely an administrative inconvenience; it means lost wages, suspended employment, lost jobs and sometimes even the loss of a place to live,” he told the Dáil.

Some people impacted by the delays have followed every single rule, Donnelly said. 

A recent policy paper from the University College Dublin's (UCD) Geary Institute for Public Policy, says that the city's immigration office “has provided an inconsistent standard of service delivery in relation to [residence permit] renewals despite repeated public commitments stating that they would provide an effective service”, it said.

It argues that those shortcomings have “wider effects on applicants and their families as it effectively pushes legal residents to become irregular migrants”.

As he spends his days at home, he has to lean on overworked colleagues to cover his shifts, Boukalfouni said.

He showed a letter from Rotunda Hospital, telling the Department of Justice how much they need him back.

“Dr Boukalfouni is a practising doctor, and his inability to work will have a direct impact on the provision of the medical services and our ability to maintain adequate staffing and patient care,” Boukalfouni reads from the letter.

If his citizenship application had been approved already, he wouldn't have had to face any of this right now, Boukalfouni said.

Sometimes, he feels bewildered by the fact that even serving the public isn’t enough to save him from immigration troubles, he said.

“I haven’t been working for Google, I haven’t been working for Microsoft, I’ve been working for the HSE,” he said.