An Iranian firefighter’s two-year quest to take up a specialist risk-management role in Limerick has become an object lesson in the human cost of Ireland’s long-stay employment-visa backlog. 42-year-old Sajjad Momeni secured an Irish work permit valid from 30 January 2025 to 29 January 2027, but the ‘D-employment’ visa he needs to enter the State is still awaiting a decision after almost 20 months. Momeni told the Limerick Post that repeated queries through the Immigration Service portal generated only monthly auto-responses urging patience. The uncertainty is now endangering both the Limerick employer’s staffing plans and the applicant’s livelihood. While the Department of Enterprise has already approved the hire, the Department of Justice must complete additional security and background checks before a visa can issue. Officials acknowledge that “some international checks can take a considerable amount of time”, but provide no escalation mechanism once published processing times are exceeded. Ireland’s labour-market shortages in specialised safety and engineering roles make such delays more than a private hardship. Employers struggling to fill critical vacancies face project overruns and higher costs, while candidates risk losing job offers or having their work-permit validity lapse. For multinationals that locate EMEA safety or emergency-response functions in Ireland, unpredictable visa timelines undermine confidence in the country’s mobility ecosystem. Practically, HR teams are being advised to build at least a nine-to-twelve-month buffer between work-permit issuance and the planned start-date, to monitor the visa queue weekly, and to prepare contingency “remote onboarding” options where feasible. Legal advisers also urge employers to keep employment-permit validity under review and, if necessary, apply for renewals well before the 90-day expiry window. The Department of Justice is quietly piloting process-improvement measures—such as risk-tiering applications and sharing biometric data with trusted partner states—but no public timeline has been given for clearing the current backlog. Until then, cases like Momeni’s illustrate why global mobility managers now rank Irish visa processing times as a top operational risk for 2026-27 assignments.
Source: Limerick Post
