The Emerald Isle is home to approximately 5,000 - 10,000 Australian citizens and continuously hosts many visitors from Australia. Many Australians have Irish heritage and some have Irish citizenship through an Irish-born parent or grandparent. The Republic of Ireland also has a working holiday visa scheme for young Australians and many Australians on working holidays to Britain use their visa to spend some time in Northern Ireland. At the same time, the island-wide economic boom of recent years has encouraged a large number of emigrants to return from Australia. Young Australian professionals are now more likely to settle in Ireland than before.

Australian citizens do not require a visa to visit Ireland, north or south, as a tourist for stays of up to six months. A valid passport is required for entry to Ireland. Note, however, that if you enter as a tourist on an Australian passport, you cannot engage in paid employment while in the country with that immigration status.

Regarding Irish citizenship, information will be made available on this website soon. If you have any queries regarding Irish citizenship, British nationality as it may apply to Ireland or any other issue in relation to Ireland, north or south, please get in contact with our SCG Ireland co-ordinator below.

Before you send a question of any nature to the SCG, please read our general policy on answering queries below.

SCG Contact in Ireland

Our volunteer for Ireland (north and south) is Críostóir (Chris) Rowland, who lives in Derry in Northern Ireland.

Críostóir Rowland
SCG Co-ordinator for Ireland
Derry
Northern Ireland
E-mail: criostoir@southern-cross-group.org

If you are an Australian living anywhere in Ireland, and would like to assist Chris with our work in Ireland, please get in touch with Anne MacGregor in Brussels.

Before You Contact the SCG

We receive many queries every day from Australians around the world. The flood of e-mails is now of such a volume that our volunteer committee is stretched to its limits. While we want to hear your thoughts and views, before you send us a message, please read the following. This will allow us to use our limited resources as effectively as possible, so that we can spend less time answering e-mails and more time developing policy submissions and doing other work of importance to the whole Australian expatriate community.

Requests to be put on the SCG E-Bulletin List

If you simply wish to be put on the SCG's free e-mail bulletin list, please sign yourself up directly rather than writing to us. This will ensure that you automatically receive updates on the progress of our various issues as events occur. Our e-mail list is powered by List Builder software and you can unsubscribe yourself at any time. We do not share your personal contact details with any other individual or organisation.

Requests for Advice on Citizenship, Immigration and Other Matters - Please Make a Donation

Quite a few questions people address to us by e-mail are already comprehensively answered on our website. Please use the search facility at the top of this page to search our whole website BEFORE you e-mail us. You should also check relevant government websites for information before you write to us.

We are receiving an increasing number of complicated queries from people wanting specific advice on their personal citizenship or immigration situation. Some of these queries can take one of our volunteers several hours to answer properly. Requests of this nature should really be addressed to a qualified immigration lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction, rather than to the SCG. While we aim to provide support to members of the Australian diaspora within the confines of our limited volunteer resources, we are not a free immigration and citizenship advice bureau. And it is disheartening to spend a great deal of time preparing responses to these queries when often the recipients even forget to thank us.

We do have a number of lawyers on our volunteer SCG Committee, qualified in various jurisdictions. Some of them have expertise in immigration and citizenship matters. If you send us a query which we judge will take more than 15 minutes to answer, we will e-mail you back and ask you to make a donation of a suggested amount to the Southern Cross Group before we provide you with an answer. You can make your donation using the Amazon Honor System. Your donation will help us pay for website hosting and the many other expenses we face in running the SCG. This is a small way that you can say thank you for the support we provide you with.

You can contact us using our general e-mail address or the e-mail address of the SCG Committee Member nearest you.