Armed with my work permit, my old GNIB card and a credit card to pay the processing fee and a hang over from Sunday night I decided that I needed to go to the Garda National Immigration Bureau to get myself updated with the system.
According to http://www.citizensinformation.ie/categories/moving-country/moving-to-ireland/rights-of-residence-in-ireland/registration-of-non-eea-nationals-in-ireland I needed to be sure I was legal :) Like every year for the last 5 years that I have had to do this (now on my 6th year) at getting a new GNIB card etc...
I queued up at 8:40am to get a ticket to queue up even more to see a representative, There were exactly 122 people ahead of me, I was number 123. I proceeded to queue till about 10:30am (approximately) before the officials decided that they have met their quota for the day. There must have been about 20-30 people still queuing for tickets. Around 10:45am I get to see a representative, I handed over my documentation and after a 2min wait and a few exchanges of words it's all ok. Now to wait for my documentation and new GNIB to be processed. What I expected to get in 10-15mins to completion, I ended up waiting about 30-40mins. I hadn't really kept a note of how long I waited.
During the wait I over hear people discuss about the GNIB being awkward, sending people around on wild goose chases to gather documentation. The whole system is wonderfully inconsistant, badly documented, badly orchestrated and under funded. I guess they just want to make it difficult for foreigners to stay legally in Ireland. The conversations and people that were around the GNIB office at that time of the day were mostly non-students, whom did not get tickets till 9:30am. God knows how long they must wait and queue to get processed. It's clear that the GNIB offices are working at near 100% capacity (I say this because not all the booths were manned).
It was like this 4yrs ago when it started getting real busy with the boom, and it still is pretty busy now. I reckon they must process about 700-800 people a day at peak periods of the year. In the end I got my documentation, I checked it and left. In a few more weeks time I think I qualify for naturalisation and long term residency, I will need to apply to make my life just that bit easier or crazier given I will need to deal with Irish Bureaucrats that love to change laws.
