Eight years for citizenship? Fair enough. Or is it?

Through Immigrant Eyes

Viktoriia Kantseva

When I first heard that the Irish Government was proposing to increase the residency requirement for citizenship from five years to eight, I immediately did the maths. Eight years from now, my daughter will be fifteen. That thought stayed with me.

When we arrived in Ireland, citizenship was probably the last thing on most Ukrainians’ minds. In those first weeks and months, life had become very simple. You wanted somewhere safe to sleep. You wanted your children to be safe. You wanted to know what was happening to your home and whether you would ever be able to return.

Temporary Protection was exactly that – temporary. We understood it, and we were grateful for it. But after a while, something changes. At first, you think about tomorrow. Then you start thinking about next month. Your child starts school. You find work. You rent a house, learn the roads, discover your local shops and slowly become familiar with the people around you.

Eventually, you realise that you are making plans again. For me, that has been one of the strangest things about the last four years. We arrived because our lives had been interrupted, but little by little, we started building ordinary lives again. And then, somewhere along the way, you start thinking about citizenship too.

Under the current rules, most people need five years of reckonable residence to apply for naturalisation. Time spent in Ireland under Temporary Protection does not count towards that requirement. The Government has also announced a new transition scheme for eligible people currently under Temporary Protection, allowing them to move to a Stamp 4 permission, with time spent on that permission counting towards citizenship.

Now the Government is proposing to increase the general requirement from five years to eight, along with other changes to the naturalisation process. I understand the reasoning. Citizenship is an important status, and it is reasonable for a country to decide what conditions people should meet before becoming citizens.

Temporary Protection was also never intended to be an automatic route to citizenship. But there is another side to this. Many Ukrainians have now spent more than four years in Ireland. During that time, people have worked, paid taxes and rent, learned English, made friends, joined local communities and watched their children grow up here. Some have changed careers. Some have started businesses. Some have bought homes.

Some have simply become very good at navigating Irish school WhatsApp groups, which is perhaps its own form of integration.

For me, this is where citizenship stops being just about having an Irish passport. It becomes much more about stability.

My daughter will be fifteen in eight years. She will have spent most of her conscious childhood in Ireland. Her friends will be here, her memories will be here, and the landscape she thinks of as ordinary will be Irish. Of course, she is Ukrainian. That will always be part of who she is.

But childhood does not wait for immigration policy to catch up.

It simply happens. The same is true for adults. At some point, you start asking whether it is sensible to buy a house, change careers, invest in a business or make other long-term decisions if you are still unsure what your immigration status will look like several years from now.

I don’t think Ireland owes anyone citizenship simply because they have lived here for a certain number of years. I also don’t think every person who arrived under Temporary Protection should automatically receive it. What I do think matters is having a clear path forward.

If someone has spent years building a life here, there should be a way to understand where those years fit into their future. People can accept difficult rules much more easily when they know what the rules are and can plan around them. Eight years may be a perfectly reasonable requirement. Perhaps it is.

But when you have already spent four years here, you don’t hear only the number. You think about the child who arrived with you. You think about the home you have built, the work you have done, the people you have met and all those completely ordinary days that slowly turn a place you once came to for safety into somewhere that feels like home.

How long can a temporary life remain temporary before it simply becomes your life?