New, blank passport in citizenship application - what travel to show

Hi, we are shortly to apply for citizenship for my American wife and would appreciate some advice on how best to illustrate our travel history

We are struggling to come up with an accurate daycount for time outside of Ireland. We have travelled a lot over the last 5 years, especially around the UK and EU for long weekends and weeks here and there (we would travel for at least a weekend trip every month). But my wife's US passport has recently been renewed and the US consulate has retained the old passport with all the entry and exit stamps (of which there were probably a couple of hundred).

We asked for her Advance Passenger Information for the last 5 years from INIS, but INIS API data does not show any travel except for the odd flight to the USA (which we are clear on anyway). For the citizenship application we can dig out the odd email booking for UK and EU trips and cross reference with photos on our phones, but it is likely to be far from accurate. We wont be outside of the daycount limits, but cant stand behind the veracity of the travel information we supply.

In considering our application will INIS reach out the UK or other European authorities in order to get more complete API, or rely on their own. We are considering asking the UK authorities for whatever API they might hold for my wife, and maybe some other authorities, so that we can be accurate in our submission and eliminate the chance that we are perceived to be misleading INIS. Is it worth doing this, or just go with our 'best guess' and assume that INIS will not get other API information from the UK and other EU countries?

Many thanks for any help

Steve

Why do they retain your wife’s old passport? That can’t be normal. INIS require stamps on your wife’s old passport in order to determine whether she satisfies the five-year residency requirement. Have you tried to request the old one back?

The sure way would be to enter all your travel dates (starting with the date each of you arrived in Ireland) in a spreadsheet year by year. We did that to calculate the number of days we went over the 6 weeks. We did have to find every single email booking to ensure our departure/arrival dates were correct. It was not an easy job as sometimes we travelled to the same place separately, with different airlines on different days. It was well worth the effort in the end.

" We wont be outside of the daycount limits, but cant stand behind the veracity of the travel information we supply"

Are they asking for travel dates even though you say you haven't been out of the country more than 6 weeks per annum, or are you just wanting to make sure you can back up your claim if it comes to it?


No idea if it matters but I traveled a lot (not sure about hundreds of times but I had to renew early due to running out of pages if that's an indication) including a year-long absence (which I explained and didn't count towards my residence of course) and it hasn't been an issue as of yet.

Although, littlrr makes a good point. Not having your old passport could be an issue, though I imagine there's some facility for people with lost passports, etc.

Does anybody know whether INIS have access to UK API data? My FOI request here illustrated that INIS seemed to not to have any record of intra EU travel (only had data for travel outside of the EU) and would therefore only be going only on passport stamps

Travel between UK and Ireland (common travel area) legally does not require border control (although there still is one when you travel from the UK to Ireland by plane).

Travel data is saved in airlines/airports databases and INIS can surely request for it if necessary. I know for a fact that they don’t normally check that in the citizenship application. Maybe because it’s too much fuss to contact each airline/airport. The onus is on applicants to provide correct travel history data and INIS would only very occasionally verify it with airlines/airports.