Applying for Irish visa outside country of residence

[jake the peg]

Hi,

I am British and my wife is Chinese. She is currently visiting me in UK on a family visit visa.

We were planning on traveling to Ireland with the possibility of moving there to live and exercising my treaty rights, so tried to apply for an entry visa under Directive 2004/38/EC. When trying to submit the application to the Irish Embassy in London we were told that applications can only be made in the applicant's country of residence, the reason given was that "bank statements, letters from employer, etc., need to be verified".

As applications under the the directive shouldn't require any bank statements or letters from employers, I can't see why they would ask us to send all the application to Beijing to process when it could simply be done in London.

Is it a standard requirement for this type of visa to be processed in country of residence, or should they be required to process the application in London?

[chaoclive]

You can apply for the equivalent of the UK EEA family permit (this is what it's called in the UK only) anywhere. The Irish Embassy also has to provide this service so they are wrong! However, I can't find a note on the whole INIS (Irish Naturalization and Immigration Service in Ireland) website that states this!

You could email the EU Treaty Rights section to see if they can drop the Embassy in London a line reminding them of the requirement to provide your wife with an entry visa: eutreatyrights@justice.ie. INIS are normally good at replying but I'm not sure how they would deal with this kind of request. If you don't ask, you will never know.

The Embassy must follow the Directive which states that: "Member States shall grant such persons every facility to obtain the necessary visas", i.e. they can't expect her to go back to China to apply there (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/sit ... 770123.pdf).

See this for the types of documentation that they [normally] require: http://www.inis.gov.ie/en/INIS/Processi ... ective.pdf. There's no mention of banks statements etc. The link might not open; in this case, just search for the title of the document ("Processing of Applications for Visas by Persons applying as Family Members of EU Citizens exercising or planning to exercise Free Movement Rights under Directive 2004/38/EC") via Google. Unfortunately, it doesn't say that the visa has to be processed anywhere.

You need to get the Irish Embassy in London to understand that they are not complying with by rejecting her application. It's best if you get access to someone in INIS first. Hope someone else will pop in with some contacts or ideas. As the only documents they can ask for are those related to your relationship, your and her passports, they are in direct contravention by asking for bank statements. You should stress that you are not applying under Irish national law.