A regulation could stop residence counting toward Irish citizenship

Ireland published the General Scheme of its citizenship bill on 21 September 2026, twelve days after the Government approved the drafting. It is the text of the proposals rather than the summary the announcement gave, and it contains something that summary did not describe: a power for the Minister to provide by regulation that permissions of a temporary or limited duration no longer count toward the residence a naturalisation applicant must show.

What was published, and when

The Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration put the General Scheme of the Irish Nationality and Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2026 on its website on 21 September 2026. The page carries that date, and the file returns a last-modified timestamp of 11:18 GMT that day. It runs to 22 pages and ten Heads.

A General Scheme is the heads of a bill. It is not a bill, and it is not law. Nothing in it carries a commencement date: Head 2 provides that the Act would come into operation on such day or days as the Minister appoints, and that different days may be appointed for different provisions.

The Legation Times reported the approval to draft on 15 September and said then that the Scheme had not been read and that whether it had been published was not established by anything read for that article. It has now been read, and so has the statute it would amend.

The residence test is written as an exclusion

The rule that decides whether a period in Ireland counts is section 16A of the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956. Read on the Law Reform Commission’s administrative consolidation, updated to 12 June 2026 and stated to be current as of 17 September 2026, it opens: “A period of residence in the State shall not be reckoned when calculating a period of residence for the purposes of granting a certificate of naturalisation if—”.

The word is “not”. The section then names what does not count: presence in contravention of the Immigration Act 2004, permission given for the purpose of a course of education or study, and a set of categories tied to international protection procedure inserted on 12 June 2026.

So the statute carries no list of permissions that do count — that is its structure only, and Immigration Service Delivery publishes guidance on top of it.

Which is where the investor route sits

That guidance is the immigration permission stamps page. Among the cases in which Stamp 4 may be given, it lists permission granted “Under the Investor and Entrepreneur Programme (including spouse/partner & eligible family member)”, using that composite name. Of the stamp it says: “Stamp 4 is reckonable as residence when applying for citizenship by naturalisation.” The page also qualifies its whole table, saying time accumulated on certain stamps “may be used to calculate your reckonable residence (subject to conditions)”.

Reckonable residence is not the whole test. Section 15 sets the qualifying periods, and a stamp identifies the permission a person holds rather than establishing that qualifying residence has been accrued.

The group concerned is bounded. Ireland closed the Immigrant Investor Programme to further applications from 15 February 2023, and the Department’s FAQ says the closure “does not affect existing projects or individuals already approved under the programme”, with applications on hand still processed. The Start-up Entrepreneur Programme takes applications “at any time”, against €50,000 of funding, though the Minister has instructed that none be accepted from Russian or Belarusian citizens.

The new paragraph

Head 9 inserts seven paragraphs into that exclusion list. Six name particular protection and free-movement situations. The seventh, paragraph (k), names none. It excludes residence “on the basis of a permission of a temporary or limited duration as the Minister may prescribe”.

Every exclusion now in section 16A was put there by an Act of the Oireachtas. Paragraph (k) would allow the next one to be made by regulation — which section 3 of the 1956 Act requires to be laid before each House, either of which may annul it within the next twenty-one days on which that House sits. The instrument would change; the Oireachtas would not drop out of it.

What the paragraph would reach is unresolved, and not because the Scheme contradicts itself. The explanatory note uses the same operative words, describing the aim as flexibility to “add any additional temporary or limited duration permission as may be appropriate”, and glosses the policy as covering permissions “inherently transitory, temporary or not intended to be durable in nature”. What is missing is any classification of the permission at issue. Immigration Service Delivery describes Stamp 4 as “permission to stay in Ireland for a specified period”, renewable before it expires; whether a permission of that shape falls inside the power is a question nothing in the record answers. The words “investor” and “Stamp” appear nowhere in the Scheme’s 22 pages, and no regulation has been made. The note also calls the new text “paragraph (l)”, where the operative provision runs from (e) to (k).

The numbers moved more than the summary said

The announcement described an increase in reckonable residence “from 5 to 8 years for most applicants”. The totals are right, and the structure beneath them also changes.

Section 15(1)(c) now requires one year of continuous residence immediately before the application and four years within the eight years before that period. Head 5 would require two years continuous and six years within the preceding ten. The continuous block doubles, the look-back window for the remainder grows from eight years to ten, and the whole span in which the residence must fall grows from nine years to twelve.

Where the record stops

Head 9 carries a saving clause, drafted as an insertion into section 16A(3). The note says what it is for: the changes should not apply to applications already submitted when the Act commences. Whether the drafting achieves that is a separate question, because the subsection it amends says “This section does not apply” — the whole section, not the changes to it. Head 2’s power to commence provisions on different days leaves the date it turns on unfixed as well.

Head 5 carries no saving clause at all, and the words “transitional”, “saver” and “retrospective” appear nowhere in the document. Whether that asymmetry carries any legal consequence is a question of interpretation this article does not answer. Neither the minimum income level, nor the language standard, nor the civics standard exists yet; each is to be prescribed, and no date attaches to any of it.