Written for SA2Eire by a Member
NOTE: This was Pre-Brexit, Pre-Covid, Pre-Visa so only some content still applies
On 11 June 2021, my partner got his 5-year letter. Almost exactly six months after we arrived in Ireland. It was probably one of the biggest “Ring the Bell” moments in our lives together. It represented almost a year of hard work, endless effort and dogged determination. And yes, days of crippling doubt.
We only made the decision to move over in July 2020, so time was not on our side. Fortunately, Warren’s brother and sister-in-law were already here, and they pointed us in the direction of the SA2Eire website. What a blessing! We paid the €10 and it was worth every cent.
I hold a British passport as I was born in England. I am also blessed to have rights to Irish citizenship through the FBR process (I am still waiting for that to be finalised). Warren, on the other hand, had only his Green Mamba, the SA passport. Oh, and we are not married. So we had two hurdles to overcome: Brexit deadlines and the arduous EU Treaty route for a De Facto spouse (EUTR1A).
Important context: this move happened pre-Brexit when the EU Treaty still applied to British passport holders. Things have changed hugely for British citizens since Brexit on 1 January 2021. However, the same process still applies in the same way to holders of other EU passports.
The prep work
Going the EU Treaty route with a British passport pre-Brexit was a relatively straightforward thing. We just needed to get ourselves over to Ireland before 31 December 2020. Oh, and for me to get a job, for us to have a bank account, and to have utilities in our name. All of it needed to be done before the end of 2020. Yes, we could do that. Thanks to SA2Eire, we had our handy checklists.
Thanks to my nature, I had the energy and the organisational skills to tackle the prep work before we came over:
- Get really good references from as many employers as possible
- Get mortgage statements showing steady payments
- Get references from previous landlords
- Get character references from upstanding people in my life
- Open a non-resident bank account and put some Rands across (and try not to cry over the exchange rate)
- Get police clearances
- Write up a family CV for both of us to make ourselves as appealing as possible to potential agents and landlords
As it turns out, that was the easy part. We arrived on 4 December 2020, I got a job and started on 19 December, the day after our quarantine ended. We moved into our new home on 21 December, having pre-arranged Sky TV, internet and utilities. We submitted our initial paperwork to the EU Treaty division on 6 December, and then bombarded them with follow-up paperwork from 23 December onwards. We still live in that house, so the months that followed made it easy to prove utilities, revenue payments by me, and so on.
The De Facto part: proving love on paper
Being part of a De Facto partnership is the difficult part.
How do you prove without a doubt that you are in fact a romantic couple, not just friends trying to pull an immigration scam? That was the real hard work for us. The Treaty Rights division has obviously been burned by fraudsters before, so they scrutinise every little detail.
To make life a little simpler for those following the EU Treaty De Facto route, here is what I gathered:
Social media evidence. A screenshot of every social media post where there were photos of us together, check-ins together, and every tag. Every single one. If, like us, you do a lot together and post prolifically, this is both a bonus and a curse. Warren and I travel together frequently and attend a lot of biker functions together, so by the time we were done we had about 100 double-sided pages of screenshots. Side benefit: going back through the posts gave us a wonderful trip down memory lane.
Photos at various stages of the relationship. I change my hairstyle and hair colour frequently, and both of us have gained a little weight since we started our relationship. So it was obvious these photos were not staged for immigration benefit. I put in all the photos, the bad and the good. Immigration do not care if you are having a bad-hair, no-makeup kind of day.
Financial evidence:
- Bank statements
- Medical aid statements
- Utility bills showing our shared address
- Because we had separate bank accounts, we highlighted the various payments we each made for household bills on our statements
It may feel a little invasive, but trust me: the Treaty Rights department do not care that one month may have been lean or that another month you were flush with cash. They just care that you shared household expenses.
Affidavits from friends, family and colleagues. Each one stamped by a Commissioner of Oaths, attesting that they knew us as a couple and had shared social moments with us as a couple.
A written love story. I wrote a long, detailed story of us as a couple, from the moment we met until our decision to immigrate. I wrote it like a love story, with anecdotes and little snippets of love. Yes, I am part Irish, so I have the “gift of the gab,” but I tried to make it feel like I was recounting the story for a friend, not an immigration officer.
Our ace in the hole. Back in 2017, Warren and I did a motorbike road trip around the perimeter of South Africa. I was asked to write an article about it for Ridefast, one of the premier motorbike magazines in SA. In it, I made multiple references to Warren as my “hubby.” This was indisputable proof that long before the two-year requirement, we were in fact a loving couple.
Ongoing evidence once in Ireland. We continued to screenshot social media check-ins. All our utilities and banking are in both our names, so we could show that we were still living together as a couple in a romantic relationship.
The result
All told, we had about 400 pages of relationship proof, plus a full copy of the Ridefast magazine, in the envelope we sent to the EU Treaty Rights division. It cost us a fair fortune at An Post, but it was worth every cent. There was no way any reasonable person could doubt that we are a couple married in all ways but the law.
Warren’s 5-year IRP came relatively quickly. We had been warned it could take up to a year. Hard work paid off in the end. (Oh, and they sent the magazine back to us by registered mail, so they clearly understood its importance.)
