Ireland plans to require that applicants live in the country for eight years before they can apply for citizenship by naturalization, three years longer than the law asks for today. The government will also test their language ability for the first time.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan set out the plan on September 7, 2026, at the Fianna Fáil party gathering in Tullamore.
The Irish Times reports that applicants will need two years of continuous residence immediately before they apply, plus six years within the ten years before that.
Section 15 of the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956 asks today for one year of continuous residence plus four years within the preceding eight. That gives five qualifying years inside a nine-year window.
People part way through the existing five-year period get no protection. O’Callaghan put it directly to reporters.
“There are cut-off points, but if you have been here for four years and 10 months by the time the laws are changed and commenced, it will affect you. That’s the truth of the matter,” he noted.
He added that legislation “will always, I suppose, affect and discriminate against people on the edges.”
The language test will accept Irish, English or Irish Sign Language, according to O’Callaghan.
None of this is drafted. O’Callaghan is expected to ask the government for approval to begin priority drafting of the Irish Nationality and Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2026, to publish an outline of it, and to send that outline to the Oireachtas justice committee for pre-legislative scrutiny.
No bill text exists, and IMI found no Department of Justice release on the announcement as of September 8, 2026. Irish outlets also disagree on when the cabinet takes it up, with the Irish Times giving one date in one piece and “later this month” in another.
Martin defended the change by comparison. “On the citizenship proposals, this is bringing us more in line with other European Union member states,” he told reporters.
That argument is well founded on the language test. Ireland asks for no language ability at all today.
Immigration Service Delivery lists full age, good character, reckonable residence, an intention to continue living in Ireland, and a declaration of fidelity. Its guide to naturalization says nothing about language anywhere.
Denmark, Luxembourg and Cyprus each test applicants, and Cyprus sets the bar at CEFR level B1.
The argument is weaker on the years. Ireland asks for five years now, and several other member states do the same.
Germany cut its requirement from eight years to five in 2024, and the 2025 coalition removed the additional three-year fast track, which leaves five in place. France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg each ask for five.
So does Portugal. Parliament there passed an increase to ten years in 2025, and the Constitutional Court struck it down on December 16, 2025.
Several member states do ask for more. Austria and Spain each require ten years of residence from most applicants, Denmark nine, and Cyprus seven years within a ten-year window.
Sweden legislated an increase from five years to eight, with the first elements taking effect from June 6, 2026.
Eight years would place Ireland above Germany, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Luxembourg, and below Denmark, Austria and Spain.
The change reaches everyone on an Irish residence permit, including the investors who came through the country’s own investment migration route.
Ireland closed the Immigrant Investor Program to new applications on February 15, 2023. That left 3,127 applications pending, worth some EUR 2.12 billion.
The department has worked through that queue slowly. Officials told the Public Accounts Committee in 2024 that clearing it would take years.
IMI reported 538 approvals in 2024, with 208 more in the first half of 2025. In 2025, O’Callaghan indicated that the department was reviewing approximately 1,600 investor applications.
Those investors receive Stamp 4 residence years after they filed. Their period toward citizenship begins on that date, so a three-year increase applies to them on the same terms as everyone else.
For internationally mobile applicants, doubling the continuous residence period from one year to two may prove the harder condition.
Section 15C of the 1956 Act, inserted in 2023, permits 70 days of absence during that period. The minister may allow 30 further days where circumstances outside the applicant’s control caused them.
Whether that allowance covers one year or both cannot be answered until a text appears.
A separate package the government approved in November 2025 proposed to exclude Stamp 0 permission from reckonable residence. Stamp 0 covers people of independent means, retirees and dependent elderly relatives.
Immigration Service Delivery marks Stamp 1, Stamp 1H and Stamp 1G as reckonable, and Stamp 2 and 2A as not reckonable. It says nothing either way about Stamp 0.
The self-sufficiency condition and the bar on applicants in long-term receipt of certain welfare payments also date from that November package.
It proposed excluding time spent under the Temporary Protection Directive, which the European Union activated in March 2022 for people displaced from Ukraine. The Central Statistics Office recorded 122,636 personal public service numbers issued to beneficiaries of temporary protection, of which 84,739 showed recent activity as of June 2026.
Section 16A of the 1956 Act does not name temporary protection among its exclusions, and the Department of Justice describes the exclusion as a proposed amendment. The Irish Refugee Council reports that the department already treats such time as outside reckonable residence.
Citizenship by descent falls outside all of this. Applicants with an Irish parent, grandparent or great-grandparent qualify through the Foreign Births Register, which the proposals do not touch.
Volume is what the government wants to reduce. O’Callaghan cited 25,000 grants of citizenship last year and told the Irish Times he wants “to restrain the level of growth in that number.”
The Irish Examiner reported 26,400 grants for 2025 and nearly 235,000 since 2011. The Department of Justice has published no annual total for 2025 that resolves the difference.
Fees may move next. The department charges €175 to apply and €950 on a positive decision, figures unchanged since 2011, and said in November 2025 that it would review them against what other European Union countries charge.
