Getting my Irish Visa
This post is so overdue I can’t believe it. But for good reason! Come along with me on this crazy ride to getting my Irish visa.
Getting my visa to stay living in Ireland (and working) has been quite the process, and a long time coming. I’ll start at the beginning.
My very first time in Ireland, I was just on a tourist visa. The program included study, but as it was only 1 class per week, they had us just use normal tourist visas. I was there for 2 months, and my unpaid internship didn’t require a work visa as I didn’t have an income. That little taste of international life made the world seem so small.
Like it was impossibly easy to go anywhere and do anything.
One year later, I made the big, official move! I came over on a Working Holiday Authorisation, which, as an American going to Ireland, lasts one year. The visa requires that you be a recent college graduate. You can work for the year, but if you get a job that doesn’t automatically entitle you to stay in Ireland working once your WHA authorisation is up. Which meant I had to get cracking looking for a job that would get me a work visa!
Work visas are a whole other kettle of fish.
There’s two main options here. For both, you have to make at least €30k (which may not sound too bad for those in the states but in Ireland can be very difficult, especially starting out). For one visa, there’s a list of jobs you can’t have (marketing was, of course, on this list). On the other visa, there’s a list of the only jobs you can have; these jobs were really heavy in the medical and tech departments. The point of this is to bring in people from other countries to fill jobs that are typically lacking in the country. That being said, you also have to jump through a few other hoops to get a work visa. The job has to be advertised for a certain amount of time in certain places (that cost the job posters money, and that no one really uses anymore). Your employer also has to prove that they couldn’t hire an Irish person for the same position. There’s a lot that goes into it!
Not to mention it costs €1,000 just to apply!
For that entire year, I worked really hard on finding a job that fit that criteria. I applied for jobs every day. It wasn’t until I mentioned in my cover letter that I could legally work already that I started even getting interviews! I had some job offers, but nothing was ticking all of those boxes for a visa. There weren’t any other immediate options to stay and work, so I turned down those jobs and kept chugging along. Eventually, I took up a seasonal position working for a Christmas jumper company. Once that was over, I finally got a position at a telecommunications company.
Long story short, I never got the work visa! I was able to switch to a visa that allowed me to live, but not work, in Ireland for the next year. I visited the states for Christmas, and then stayed a little longer to be with my family.
Once I came back, it was finally time to apply for the big visa: the De Facto.
This visa is for long term relationships, to basically help avoid people getting married just for visas. It’s a really good set-up, but it still of course requires quite a lot to get approved! The main requirement is that you have to be in a relationship with an Irish national and living with them (in Ireland) for 2 years. You need a lot of proof for the living together part (rent/mortgage payments, utilities, things with both of your names on, mutual bank account, etc) but you also need a lot of proof that you’re actually together and that you’re going to stay together. We had to submit our texts, photos together, tickets to events together, and we even had to have a witness vouch for the strength of our relationship. In the end, all of the information that we had to put together was a huge, thick packet that took time and money to put together. After that, it took another 6 months (including some more documentation) to get approved for the visa.
Now I am finally able to live in Ireland, come and go as I please, and most importantly work without any restrictions. I have to go in annually and pay €300 to get a new card that I use when I’m traveling to prove I am who I am and have the visa I have.
It took 2 and a half years, and it was so worth it.
There wasn’t a whole lot that I put up about my struggles in getting a visa while it was happening. But it was something that really disheartened me. There were a few times when I really had to decide if the time, money, and emotional hardship of it was worthwhile. Even after getting my visa sorted after so long, I still had a problem during my trip to France this month when I discovered that they’d given me the wrong stamp in my passport. It’s time intensive and very expensive, but when you love a place, you find a way to make it happen!
With my new visa, I’m working for Junk Kouture. It’s a recycled fashion competition for secondary school students (high school aged). I’m on the marketing team, and my job is far from traditional. I work in a really fun office in the city centre, my day to day is rarely the same, and getting to see it all come together is such an amazing feeling. If you want to check it out, visit our
Website: www.boijunkkouture.com
Instagram: @JunkKouture
Facebook: www.facebook.com/JunkKouture
If posts are slower to go up, I apologise! This takes up most of my time! If you want to hear more about Junk Kouture and what it's like to work there, let me know with a comment. If you're interested in hearing more about living in a different country - what I like, what's difficult, my experience making friends, going more in depth on the job search, then let me know that as well.
I have some really cool trips and posts coming up, so make sure you’re subscribed!