Re-entry visa Ireland after accidental EU rights expiry

[lukk]

Hi,

My wife's residency permit (based on my EU nationality) expired by a coincidence / omission 2 days (Friday) before she was due to travel (Monday) with the kids (2 x Irish citizens, 1 x non-Irish citizen). They've been effectively stuck there for the last 3 months as she now needs a re-entry visa to Ireland to be able to go in person to INIS to re-apply for her EU residence. We only learnt about the residence expiry when she went to INIS to enquire why her GBNID card renewal wasn't ready yet. It seems that after 5 years we needed to apply for a conversion of her EU-rights base residence into a stamp 4 residence. Unfortunately we weren't aware of it, we thought that GBNID card renewal was all we needed to do.

We applied for the re-entry visa a month ago as it took us time to figure out what happened and collect the required documentation. E.g. her old passports were with INIS as we had already applied for her naturalisation so we needed to get them back from INIS.

According to the embassy my son without the Irish nationality doesnt need a visa as a "returning minor".
We were also told by the embassy that processing time for the re-entry visa are min 10 weeks which makes it mid October which is very close to the currently booked return tickets for End of November.

I am an Irish citizen now so we are a family with 3 Irish citizens two non-citizens of which only one requires an entry visa. I have a job, own a house and my wife has a 5yrs residence history for Ireland.

Any advice on what I can do to accelerate the process?