Passport renewal with name change to mononym / problems with DFA

[BlueRectangle]

Good day, all.

I am not quite sure if this post - which is about problems with DFA for renewing a passport with a name change - is or is not suitable for this forum. It *is* DFA, it *is* about passport, but it is not about immigration. Seems a bit 67, you know?

I am not trying to force myself on people - if this post isn't really for here, please can an admin delete it.

So, on to the post itself.

About two and a half years ago, in the UK on my UK passport, I changed my name, to a mononym.

In the UK, to change name you make a document called a deed poll, have it attested by a notary, and then go with it in hand to the banks and so on and they change your name.

I hold also Irish citizenship.

In Ireland, you can change name only after two years, by providing documents two or more years old showing usage.

After two years plus a bit of delay, I needed the passports for some things, I applied for a new Irish passport, with name change.

There are a couple of different versions on the various IE Government web-sites of what documents are required.

About two weeks after the passport application (with name change) was sent it, I received a boilerplate, standard email from DFA, giving me (yet another and different) list of what documents are required, but a version more generous than all the others, and telling me to provide those documents.

I *had* provided those documents, so I was nonplussed.

There was no other information. It was a standard content, non-personalized email.

The only thought I had was perhaps where I had printed downloaded copies of bank statements, this was a problem, and I needed to provide originals from the banks.

I did not contact DFA to ask, as I had in a different matter has reason to contact DFA Support a number of times some years before, and they were not in a position to provide any help, to anyone, about anything, ever. They had no information about anything; they were a call center literally and actually without access to any DFA information.

Obtaining bank statements direct from source took six weeks, as one of the statements did not arrive and had to be resent.

I came to submit these new documents and discovered DFA have a particular process to do so, and that process can time out, and by six weeks having passed, it had timed out, and I had to restart that process.

To do this, I contacted DFA Support, as this is how you are instructed to restart that process.

During my conversation with DFA Support, it became apparent that DFA Support had improved and they could provide information, which is good, and I then found out why the application was rejected; DFA required first names on all documents to match.

The new name is a mononym, a single name only. In practice out in the real world, first names are mandatory and with mononyms organizations use placeholders for the "first name", and the placeholder varies by organization - so one organization used '-' and others 'XXX".

The position of the DFA appears to be that first name and last name must match everywhere, even if you do not have a first name, and so if they do not match, no change can occur.

This requires me to control the placeholder used by organizations, which I can sometimes do, and sometimes cannot.

After some hours of dialogue, it was in the end evident I would need to contact a lawyer, which is a crazy, and it is something you do when and only when there is *absolutely* no other way to make progress, *at all* - you have *no* hope, *ever*, of anything else.

Can anyone suggest lawyers to contract regarding this matter?

I've done some Googling, and some contacting, so far without success. Either no replies, or too busy, or not their line of work.