Between 2023 and late March 2025, the Department of Justice spent over €4.6 million on court cases brought by citizenship seekers, official figures say.
Ali Butt had promised his kids he’d take them to Disneyland in Paris this summer, he says.
He has three kids. He had reckoned he would have his citizenship and Irish passport by then, which would save on visa application fees and the hassle of grabbing a visa appointment slot, he says.
But he’s given up hope now, he says.
Butt, a Pakistani citizen, who is a part-time postal worker in Ireland, applied for Irish citizenship in May 2023, he says.
In response to a legal threat from his lawyer recently, the Department of Justice offered a familiar response: it’s running background checks. If they wrapped up in 12 weeks, they’d send him the decision, the letter said.
If it took longer, and he went to court, the department would likely settle with him and deliver a decision quickly, if history is a guide.
The letter asks Butt’s lawyer not to press on with a court case right now while his case is active. “It is the view of this office that legal proceedings are inappropriate at this time.”
Butt says his friends got the exact same reply, word for word. “I know 2 or 3 people got same reply,” he said in a WhatsApp message last week].
Some would-be citizens have voiced concerns in the past that opaque Garda procedures for international background checks hold up their applications for years, prolonging their limbo.
Butt is not alone in turning to the courts to get a decision, frustrated by lengthy delays in processing their citizenship applications.
Between 2023 and late March of this year, the Department of Justice spent over €4.6 million on court cases brought by citizenship seekers, official figures show. Those who win settlements sign a non-disclosure agreement and can’t talk about its terms.
In March, the Minister for Justice, Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan TD, told the Dáil that some of these cases are filed by immigrants who had faced lengthy delays.
The citizenship unit is doing what it can to speed them up, he said, but some international checks can take a huge amount of time. “And these are largely out of the control of the Immigration Service,” O’Callaghan said.
So, do some people have to continue waiting for years while others’ checks wrap up faster, and the Department has to spend money compensating them? Is there no other solution?
Wendy Lyon, immigration solicitor at Abbey Law, says one potential solution is granting citizenship when normal background checks turn up clear. Then stripping it if something seriously wrong turns up in more thorough international checks later.
Eoghan McMahon, solicitor at the law firm McGrath Mullan, says that could offer some relief ,“in terms of travelling, you don’t have to worry about IRP [Irish Residence Permit] renewal”.
But he’s worried it’d add another tier to a system that already discriminates between people who got their citizenship by birth, and those who got it through naturalisation, he says.
Lyon says taking away people’s citizenship is already a possibility again, so that doesn’t make much of a difference.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice has not yet responded to queries sent on 23 April, including one asking about potential solutions.
The Department of Justice is cagey about the nature of its lengthy international background checks.
Butt, the Pakistani citizen, says he’s never committed a crime, neither here nor anywhere else. He can’t figure out what could possibly hold up his application, he says.
A subject access request – which someone can make under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to offices holding their data, asking for a copy – didn’t shed any light on it either, Butt says.
Lawyers have said in the past that these checks – if they do happen – may go beyond normal background checks and look into dropped charges or police reports that didn’t go anywhere, but could be considered in judging someone’s character.
In September of last year, People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy asked the then Minister for Justice, Fine Gael’s Helen McEntee TD, if her officials sought information from authoritarian regimes about their citizens, as part of these checks.
McEntee said it’s “not the practice” to comment on these inquiries. “For sound security and operational reasons.”
Nevertheless, an analysis of official figures for cases filed between 2020 and 2022 showed that citizens of countries like Somalia, Iran and Afghanistan faced lengthy delays despite the overall lower number of applications from their citizens.
Of the 317 Somali citizens who had applied for Irish citizenship within that window, 153 were still waiting in October 2024 – that’s 48 percent.
(The Department of Justice did not respond to a query asking for fresh figures.)
Butt, the man who’s been waiting for two years, and had been hoping to take his kids to Disneyland in Paris this summer, says he’s noticed how some fellow Pakistanis were in the same boat, facing prolonged background checks.
Of the 2,933 citizens of Pakistan who applied for citizenship between 2020 and 2022, 902 – or 30 percent – of them were still waiting in October 2024, official figures show.
“We don’t know what background checks they’re doing, I didn’t make any crime in any country,” said Butt.
It’s not only non-Western immigrants who can end up waiting a long time, though.
In October 2024, 29 percent of citizenship applications filed by American citizens between 2020 and 2022 remained undecided.
But not all those Americans are immigrants who lived here and racked up five years of residency that counted for citizenship.
Some have applied for an Irish passport from abroad, claiming they have Irish ties or, as it’s known, sought citizenship by association.
Joseph Seletski was one of them. He’s a New Yorker with maternal Irish roots.
He’s crazy about Ireland, and has been practising and excelling at Irish dance since childhood, he said, recently on a video call from his home in New York.
He now trains generations of dancers in the United States to keep the Irish culture alive, he says, and is always involved in his local Paddy’s Day parades.
Some of his students end up travelling to Ireland to partake in a programme that the University of Limerick offers, he said. “I felt like having Irish citizenship would make me whole.”
He applied in 2020. After about four years, he finally lawyered up, sent a legal threat, and won a settlement this year, which he can’t discuss because he’s signed an NDA, he said.
He got a decision, too. His connection to Ireland wasn’t strong enough – it’s just too far back in his family tree, it said, even though he is of Irish descent.
Seletski says he was heartbroken, partly because of the amount of time it took just to hear a no.
At one point, they asked him for a fresh police clearance certificate – a document certifying someone’s crime-free past – he says, and he spent money to get it again.
He thought it was worth it, Seletski said. That a new clearance certificate was the only thing standing between him and an Irish passport. “That gave me false hope,” he said.
The Department of Justice has recently drawn up fresh, detailed rules for citizenship via Irish association.
These clarify eligibility conditions for people connected to Irishness in different ways, whether those associations are via “blood”, marriage, or adoption, laying down guidelines that apply to each.
Though it repeats that the final decision is in the “absolute discretion” of the minister.
Seletski knew this much, he says.
In March 2024, he was tempted to approach then-Minister for Justice McEntee at a St Patrick’s Day breakfast hosted by the mayor of New York, to which he was also invited, Seletski says. “I knew she would be in attendance.”
He thought he could go and say hello, he says, introduce himself, and tell her how long he’d waited. But it felt like skipping a step and somehow wrong, says Seletski.
“My morals kicked in. I felt like doing the wrong thing for the right reason, doesn’t make it right, right?”
Nevertheless, new guidelines for Irish association cases won’t help those stuck in the background checks phase.
McMahon, the solicitor at McGrath Mullan, says that if the Department of Justice were to grant provisional citizenship before its more detailed international background checks wrapped up, people might feel a low hum of anxiety that they might lose it at any time.
“Will it have a chilling effect on, you know, people’s comfort?” he says.
But Lyon says it wouldn’t change anything that can’t already happen. “If it emerges that you had committed a serious crime before you were naturalised and you didn’t admit it, then they can revoke based on misrepresentation.”
In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the law for stripping naturalised citizens of Irish citizenship wasn’t legally sound. But the Department of Justice recently brought back rules to take passports away in “serious cases”, says a press release dated 10 April.
In the past decade, the state has stripped six naturalised citizens of their Irish citizenship, official figures show.
For McMahon, a better solution than granting people citizenship while they await international checks is for the Department of Justice to press the parties carrying these checks to do it faster, he says.
He says if it has initiated these checks, it should have some influence on their pace. If it’s talking to different government officials, it can ramp up pressure.
People shouldn’t be waiting years for a decision, McMahon says. “It is a complete disgrace, and something has to be absolutely done about that; it’s no way to treat people.”
Butt, the Pakistani citizen still awaiting a decision, says his lawyer told him to wait 12 more weeks to see what happens. But he’s getting angsty, he said.
A spokesperson for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not yet responded to a query sent on Tuesday, asking if it’s carrying out these checks for the Irish government and whether it plans to speed them up.
Meanwhile, Butt’s search for normalcy, from fighting for a stable immigration status to applying for citizenship, feels never-ending, and he’s exhausted, he said.
“You can understand my frustration, [I’m] losing my mental health,” he says.
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