In January, Rehman Faryal\u2019s parents travelled to Ireland for a visit, he said, recently.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Faryal, who\u2019s a hospital doctor, planned to go on leave to be by her side, he said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Faryal logged into the immigration office\u2019s customer service portal<\/a>, asking if it\u2019s possible to speed up the renewal. If he left the country without a valid IRP, he wouldn\u2019t be let back in.<\/p>\n The immigration office closed Faryal\u2019s request on the portal, \u201cwithout responding after 10 days\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n He deferred his annual leave arrangement at work, sent another request via the portal and got a stock response, he said. \u201cMy mother is currently in chemotherapy,\u201d said Faryal.<\/p>\n His wait for IRP renewal is nearing four months now, said Faryal. He\u2019s not alone.<\/p>\n Processing backlogs has touched the lives of many immigrants since earlier this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n At the moment, people renewing Stamp 4 immigration permissions \u2013 a long-term stamp with better rights and entitlements than short-term ones \u2013 like Faryal, say they\u2019re still facing them, costing them jobs and taking away their freedom to travel, including for emergencies.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, stamp registrations and renewals brought in \u20ac79 million in revenue for the state in 2025, according to Department of Justice figures<\/a>. Lots of people have to pay \u20ac300 to register or reactivate their stamps, though some are exempt depending on the basis of their immigration stamp.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said the city\u2019s immigration office is still grappling with a mountain of both first-time stamp registration and renewal requests.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd are exploring every avenue available to facilitate as many customers as possible and to increase processing capacity,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n Life on hold<\/p>\n The spokesperson for the Department of Justice said it\u2019s doing what it can to speed up and tackle the backlog.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It considers requests to prioritise applications for \u201cextenuating\u201d situations on a case-by-case basis, the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t have a breakdown of caseload by category available at hand, they said.<\/p>\n But, generally, 77,000 renewal applications<\/a> are still pending, said Fine Gael’s Colm Brophy TD, a junior minister at the Department of Justice, in response to a parliamentary question\u00a0this month.<\/p>\n In the meantime, people waiting feel the impact in big or small ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n Anjali Parmar\u2019s loan approval depends on a fresh Stamp 4 immigration permission, she said. \u201cAs the bank needs IRP,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n 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, \u201cthey just give me automated response\u201d, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n And she\u2019s not hopeful, Parmar said. \u201cWith the current processing, I think it\u2019s gonna take another two months.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n J\u0119drzej Nowe\u2019s partner is stuck in her country of birth, Turkey, where she\u2019d travelled \u201cto take care of her family\u201d, he said recently.\u00a0<\/p>\n She needs to renew her permit while she waits for a decision on her citizenship application, said Nowe. \u201cWe thought it was a reasonable choice for her to leave,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n They\u2019d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n What they hadn\u2019t envisioned, he said, was that it wouldn\u2019t be coming any time soon.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t give you the right to live and work here.<\/p>\n The first request for a re-entry visa, he said, was closed without any explanation. On the second one, \u201cthey replied that this is not a sufficient reason to get a re-entry visa\u201d, said Nowe.<\/p>\n Nowe\u2019s partner, who had applied to renew on 6 March \u2013 the earliest time she could \u2013 is also a tech worker who was recently laid off by Meta and is set to join Google soon, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n That also depends on her IRP coming through while the company\u2019s offer still stands, said Nowe.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHer employment is basically hangs on the fact that her Stamp 4 is not being issued,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, Nowe texted to say it had progressed by just one day.<\/p>\n Others have also reported issues getting their IRPs in the post after they\u2019ve been successfully processed.<\/p>\n An email from the immigration office to some applicants recently said it had \u201cidentified an issue where some recently approved [IRP] cards have not been successfully issued\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n It has now resolved the glitch and reissued the permits, it said.<\/p>\n Brophy, the Fine Gael junior minister at the Department of Justice, recently told<\/a> Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon that it outsources the IRP printing service to a \u201cthird-party provider\u201d.<\/p>\n Sometimes there are delays in printing them because of its \u201cnecessary and routine system maintenance\u201d, but they\u2019re short-lived, he said.<\/p>\n It\u2019s using an external supplier to free up civil servants so they can focus on processing actual applications, Brophy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n With great (man)power<\/p>\n Nowe, the man whose partner can\u2019t return from Turkey,\u00a0looked for a TD in their area that he was sure didn\u2019t hold anti-immigrant views, and contacted People Before Profit\u2019s Richard Boyd Barrett, he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n