Sasha Romanova Belarusian journalist in Galway

THE GOVERNMENT PLANS to raise the residence requirement for Irish citizenship from five years to eight.

Every adult applicant will also have to prove financial self-sufficiency and pass language and civics tests. The minister has confirmed that even someone with four years and 10 months of residence would have to wait the full eight years.

Speaking in the Seanad on 24 September, Senator Aubrey McCarthy said it was unfair to people who came to Ireland under the old rules.

Supporters of the change might ask: why can’t they just wait 3 more years? As a Belarusian journalist whose family came to Galway on a Critical Skills permit, I put this question to others who arrived the same way.

Some can’t renew their passports or travel for work. Others have spent months waiting for their residence cards or for visas for their parents.

Rights and obligations

Ivan Budylin has worked for Microsoft since 2011. He started in the company’s Moscow office and stayed until its closure in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Ivan Budylin

Microsoft rehired him in Dublin, where he now works in cybersecurity for clients in Central and South-Eastern Europe.

“I make the world a safer place,” he says. He speaks in a personal capacity, not for his employer.

Ivan came to Ireland in December 2022. Last October, he and his wife moved into a house they bought in Co Wicklow, with a 25-year mortgage.

“I’m not going anywhere. And I have nowhere to go,” he told me.

Since 2011, Ivan has attended every protest against Vladimir Putin he could. In Russia, that alone was suspicious, he says, and working for an American company made it worse.

“State propaganda had a ready answer for people like me: you work for the Americans, so you must be flying to the States for instructions from your overseas masters.”

After the full-scale invasion, such talk became dangerous.

“If I end up physically in Russia, I have two options. Either straight to the meat grinder, or to prison first and then to the meat grinder,” he says, meaning being sent to fight in Ukraine.

Ivan works with several hundred customers in more than a dozen countries, including those with the most reason to worry about Russia: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

“In cybersecurity, there are things you don’t discuss online. You need to be in the same room. So I tell clients: I can’t come, because your border guards are allergic to the colour of my passport.”

He is careful to add that it is a joke.

“I understand why those rules exist. But the passport I hold, and the one I don’t, are what stop me being more useful to Europe.”

Since 2022, Poland and the Baltic States have refused entry to Russian citizens travelling on Schengen visas, including for business. Exceptions exist, but getting one is a challenge in itself. The one time Microsoft got Ivan into Lithuania, colleagues had to stand by to confirm to border guards that he was needed there.

“The questions they asked me at the border are hard to put into words.”

He has missed at least three professional conferences in three years. Ivan planned to apply for Irish citizenship in early 2028. Under the new rules he will have to wait three more years.

“When I tell my Irish neighbours and colleagues that I’m stuck on this island like in prison and the government wants to extend my sentence, they say it shouldn’t be like this. Maybe Ireland has problems with illegal migration, they tell me, but you’re normal.”

Ivan hears “you’re normal” in almost every conversation.

He is not trying to become Irish, he says. The distinction between ethnicity and nationality is, for him, the whole argument.

“A cat will never become a dog. A big blond guy called Ivan will never become Irish. It doesn’t work that way. It’s like marriage. Some people see it as a sacred union blessed in heaven. But in the prosaic sense, marriage is a legal status for two people who live together and share a household. It’s about their rights and obligations. A passport is the same.”

Back in Moscow, though, he worked with a foundation promoting ethnic cultures, Irish among them, and twice played St Patrick at the city’s parade, in a costume his mother sewed.

As far as he knows, it is still kept and worn at the Irish Embassy there.

“But I’m not asking for an exception because of it.”

An Irish passport would mean permanent legal status and no more yearly letters from his bank threatening to freeze his account unless he shows a fresh Irish Residence Permit (IRP) card.

Mostly, though, it would put him back in the room with the people he is paid to defend.

“I could bring more value to my customers, to Ireland, to Europe.”

Anothern Russia case 

She studied Irish in Moscow. Her family now meets her in China. When Caitríona Mosk moved to Ireland from Russia in 2020, she already spoke some Irish.

Her passport says Ekaterina Moskovskova, but she signs with the Irish form of her name. She had enrolled in philology at Moscow State University because it was the only place in Russia where she could study Irish officially.

“I adored Irish songs and wanted to know what these people were singing about,” she explained.

In her first year at the university, Caitríona bought a small harp, in her second she took up Irish dancing. She first came to Ireland in 2010 for a dance competition, with her harp, dance shoes and dress in her luggage, and won second place in Premiership in Ashbourne.

The staff at the Irish embassy in Moscow knew her by sight: she played the harp at their official events.

As a student, she worked for a year to save money for a visa and a course in the cláirseach, the old Irish harp pictured on Irish euro coins. Later she won a scholarship to spend a semester at Trinity College’s School of Celtic Studies. Her thesis compared Irish, Russian and Carpathian Ukrainian funeral folklore.

Last October, it grew into a book ‘Irish Death Culture’, published by Mann Ivanov and Ferber.

Today Caitríona and her husband, a software developer, live in a village in Connemara, volunteer and play music for the local community. The Moscow band Polca an Rí, which Caitríona played Irish music with, partly moved to Serbia after the war began.

“People here still ask me how my musician friends are doing. They can’t come to Ireland anymore, they don’t get short visit visas.”

Regularly, in Novi Sad, they still gather for the session to play Irish music.

For her first years in Ireland, Caitríona says, the immigration system kept getting better. Residence card renewals moved online, and hers took two weeks. In 2025 though, the delays began.

One renewal fell over the Christmas holidays. She had applied, paid in advance and was still waiting for her card when the Department of Justice announced that people with expired IRPs could re-enter the country during the holidays. Caitríona printed the notice and flew out.

On the way back, at the airport in Doha, the airline refused to let her board.

“I had the printout from the Department of Justice and the letters saying I’d paid for the renewal. Nobody cared. People don’t understand what a piece of paper saying that an expired document is valid is supposed to mean.”

She was lucky: the new card had arrived at her house in Connemara, and a friend staying there photographed it. Only then was she allowed on the plane.

Delays with residence cards were only the start. Caitríona collected stories of visa refusals for a petition to the Oireachtas Committee from the residents in Ireland.

“A father dies, the mother stays alone in Russia, the family wants to bring her over for Christmas, and she is refused. Someone’s mother is 80, and they don’t know if they’ll ever see each other again.”

Her own family didn’t risk applying. Her parents and mother-in-law used to visit them in Connemara. This time they all met in China. 

Instead of clearing the backlog, they move the deadline

“Instead of becoming more efficient, the department comes up with changes that make migrants’ lives worse. They can’t cope with the number of applications, so now it might be eight years instead of five,” Caitríona argues.

She believes increasing experience of family visit visa refusals is part of a pattern leading to the new citizenship rules. 

Caitríona applied for Irish citizenship a few months ago. If the government doesn’t include a transition period for applications already submitted, she will have to wait three more years and apply again.

“We always trusted Ireland completely. We got used to the human approach. When you live in other countries, you always expect a catch, you’re always tense, you calculate every step ahead.

“The last year has shown us that this is changing here too. I love Ireland, its culture, everything. But now I feel that we ran from this at home, and it caught up with us here.”

‘My passport will run out before Ireland’s eight years do’

Caitríona’s words about running from something at home and finding it here are familiar to me.

My family fled Belarus in 2020, after the KGB searched our flat in Minsk, and I have since been labelled an ‘extremist’ there for my journalism.

Our son was born in exile in Lithuania a year later.

This September he started Junior Infants in Galway, and every morning we cycle to school together.

He is five, he has never had a passport of any country, and his right to live here depends on our Irish residence permits.

We moved to Galway in 2023, when my husband got a Critical Skills job offer from an Irish tech company. He has since moved to Stamp 4 and founded his own tech company here. We pay Irish taxes and a mortgage for our house, and we had a plan: 5 years, then citizenship.

The date mattered. Our Belarusian passports expire in 2030, and since 2023 Belarusian embassies no longer issue or renew them abroad. A new one can be issued only in Minsk, and I know which building I would end up in.

The 8-year rule moves our earliest application to 2031, a year after our passports expire. Without a valid passport we can’t renew our residence permits, so our only legal option would be to ask for international protection, taking a bed in an asylum system that already struggles to house people who arrive with nothing.

Asylum seekers can’t work for their first six months. Who would pay our mortgage then?

Senator McCarthy is right: a transition period for those already here would be fair to Ivan, Caitríona and my family. Without it, I would like to ask the government: what problem are you solving? If the goal is fewer citizenship applications, you could simply stop issuing Critical Skills permits.

The effect would be the same, and people like us would at least know the rules before we came.