Since June, there’s been a shift in how the Department of Justice has ruled on these applications – more rejections, says immigration solicitor Imran Khurshid.
Manasa Rayaji came to Ireland to study, finished her master’s in marketing at Dublin Business School, and then set about looking for a company that would sponsor a work permit so she could stay on.
With the end of her grace time nearing, she applied in September to the Department of Justice for a little more time to job-hunt – but hasn’t heard back.
Now she’s got an offer from a company willing to sponsor a work permit for her. But without the extension, her Irish Residence Permit (IRP) has lapsed so she can’t take up the job, she says.
The company hasn’t withdrawn its offer yet, said Rayaji, but it’s drifting further out of reach every day. “They’re not gonna wait for me forever.”
She’s also losing her current job – which helped her pay the bills – because she’s technically undocumented.
Her friend, in the same boat, who had applied before her, did get an extension in June, no problem, said Rayaji.
A little after June 2025, there was a shift in how the Department of Justice was ruling on these applications – he was seeing more rejections, says Imran Khurshid, an immigration solicitor in Dublin.
If, last January, a graduate client asked him about their chances, Khurshid said, “I would tell that client, look, this is at the minister’s discretion, but I’m more than 90 percent sure you will get it”.
It’s hard to say, though, whether the Department of Justice is systematically responding to these cases differently. Its figures don’t include a breakdown of extension requests from 1G holders who didn’t yet have a work permit.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said its graduate scheme offers a time-sensitive immigration stamp. It’s expecting those who couldn’t apply for a work permit by the time it ran out to leave the country, they said.
They didn’t say how long it currently takes to process extension requests. But it’s seen a “very high level” of growth in applications, and it’s reviewing them chronologically to be fair, the spokesperson said.
Khurshid, the solicitor, says that reluctance to give a few more months to those who want to do everything by the book will push some to walk the opposite path, going off-grid and turning to “employers who are going to exploit them”.
The Department of Justice has rolled out more restrictive immigration policies in a bid to slow population growth, said Minister for Justice, Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan TD, last year.
Although a recent report from the government advisory body the National Economic and Social Council says a desire to lower population surge and immigration – to release short-term pressures like housing shortage – shouldn’t lose sight of long-run effects.
The dip can prompt a “vicious cycle” in which birth rates fall further, “emigration rises, and the population continues to age” and the economic consequences of that, it says.
After graduation, students from outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) who have paid steep fees for higher education can move on to Stamp 1G graduate immigration permissions to search for a job and a work-permit sponsorship.
They’re working against the clock, though.
Those who have finished an undergraduate course at level 8 have one year to sort it, while master's and PhD graduates have two.
Like Rayaji, Nnenna Ogbenna moved to Ireland to do a master’s.
Ogbenna already had a background in law when she enrolled in a data protection course here, she said, recently, sitting at a city café.
She thought that would set her on a path to a decent job and a work permit, said Ogbenna. But her search was coming up empty.
“Trying to get jobs in that aspect was very hard,” she said.
Sometimes, she couldn’t even get an interview, said Ogbenna. It made her feel like jobs like that weren’t meant for people like her, she said.
She finally threw in the towel and decided to do something entirely else, Ogbenna said. “I started doing healthcare.”
She enrolled in healthcare assistant courses, and didn’t find the switch too daunting, Ogbenna says.
She still has a few more exams to fully qualify, which would make her work permit application more likely to be successful. And she has been working, too.
But “to get a sponsorship, you probably have to have worked for over a year. Currently, I’m almost at a year,” she said.
Her graduate permission was set to expire in early December 2025.
She wanted to apply early, Ogbenna said, but her lawyer told her if she lodged the extension request too soon or too late, it wouldn’t work in her favour.
“So we did it in October, and we ended up here,” she said.
Now undocumented, Ogbenna lives in the same limbo as Rayaji.
Her employer put her on unpaid leave to see if her extension comes through by the end of January, she said. But it didn’t.
She’s dipped into her savings to pay rent and everyday expenses, she said. “Which I don’t think is going to last very long.”
The Department of Justice spokesperson said that the minister doesn’t really use his discretion on these cases “unless there are truly exceptional circumstances”.
While it’s unclear what counts, Khurshid, the solicitor, says that hasn’t really been his experience in the past.
He said Department of Justice officials used to be understanding when it came to graduates needing a little more time to steady their status. “Unless someone had been involved in criminal activity,” he said.
For people with expired 1G stamps, whether they can still work while their extension appeals are pending with the Department of Justice is another source of confusion.
A letter from Ogbenna’s employer says she doesn’t seem to have that right.
Workers renewing different immigration stamps get an acknowledgement email with a unique reference number, known as OREG.
Since the pandemic years, when lockdowns ballooned immigration renewal applications into a backlog, the Department of Justice has allowed those workers to keep working for up to 12 weeks on an expired IRP if their renewal application took too long to process.
It has a “notice to employers” on its website that lays all that out.
Sitting at his desk on a recent morning, Khurshid pulls up a text from a graduate client and reads it aloud.
They’d asked if there’s any way they can get an “OREG number” to show their boss and keep working on an expired permit while the extension request is being processed.
“But you don’t get that number,” said Khurshid. Renewal and extension applications are entirely different; they don’t even go to the same place, he says.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said extension seekers who are still waiting on a decision aren’t allowed to work past the expiry of their 1G stamps.
That 12-weeks extra? That only applies to “people who currently have an immigration permission to be in the State and are simply waiting for the registration office to process their renewal application”, they said.
Shashank Chakerwarti, a peace commissioner in Dublin, says that causes graduates from elsewhere to lose their jobs and job offers.
He’s written to Minister O’Callaghan, flagging their troubles, he said.
“Extended processing times—often exceeding three to six months—have created profound and tangible difficulties for applicants,” his letter says.
Last December, the Minister replied through his private secretary. But the response doesn’t say much beyond outlining how the immigration journey from studenthood to job-seeker to work-permit worker is meant to unfold, at least on paper.
Chakerwarti has filed a Freedom of Information request, and later an appeal to the Office of the Information Commissioner, trying to dig deeper into the policy behind what rights people have as they wait.
He has just launched an online petition too, advocating for “international graduates’ right to work while an extension application is pending”, it says.
The Department of Justice spokesperson said that how long those applications take to process depends on a range of factors, including, among other things, caseload and resources.
Khurshid, the solicitor, says students and graduates from elsewhere all contribute towards the health of the economy, and if their numbers were to fall, it’s bound to feel their absence.
Besides, he said, refusing to renew someone’s status for a few more months doesn’t always mean they will up and leave, he said.
He already has one client who is going to apply for asylum, he said. Others might drop off the radar, and that’s unfair because they really wanted to follow the law, which is why they’d asked for extensions in the first place.
The December 2025 National and Social Economic Council report says birth rates are falling and “within a decade, the ratio of workers to non-workers will narrow, and the population is projected to contract by the 2050”.
One way for the government to respond to recent hikes in population growth is to see it as an opportunity to invest better to make room for more people.
“Migration is a key lever as it can help replenish the workforce, enrich communities and offset population ageing,” it says.
Beefing up housing capacity and successful integration can help achieve that, it says.
Last week, Spain rolled out a scheme to offer immigration papers to hundreds of thousands of undocumented people, with all that in mind.
In a press release, last week, Laetitia Van der Vennet, senior advocacy officer at Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM), praised Spanish officials for showing “humanity and common sense”.
“We hope more governments will follow this example and invest in policies that protect, empower and include people, and make societies stronger,” she said.
Elma Saiz Delgado, Spain’s minister for migration had said that the decision would help “our social cohesion, well-being, and also on the economy”, according to the New York Times.
Rayaji, who took out a €16,000 loan in India, her country of birth, to afford doing a master’s in Ireland, says that without a job here, she won’t be able to repay it. “I have such bad anxiety at the moment,” she said,
She’s also paid over a grand to an agency to file her extension request because the process is not straightforward like with renewals, said Rayaji.
Some nights, she said, she’s rattled out of sleep, shaking with worry but also hope that maybe tomorrow will bring her approval letter.
“I think the hope is going to kill us in the end. I really want to live here,” Rayaji said.
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