On an Irish employment permit when a PIP ends badly

Does a PIP affect my employment permit?

No. A plan is not an immigration event. Your permit was granted for a named employer and a named job, and both are still what they were.

This page is for General Employment Permit and Critical Skills Employment Permit holders. If you are an EU or EEA national, or you hold Stamp 4 or a Stamp 1G graduate permission, none of it applies to you.

The four weeks and six months you will find first are a redundancy scheme

Search for your position and you will land on a clear, official, well-publicised arrangement: four weeks to notify, six months to find another job. It is the most visible material Ireland publishes on this, and for most readers of this page it is the wrong material.

It is a redundancy scheme. The prescribed form is titled Notification of dismissal by reason of redundancy, and the Department's page speaks throughout of redundancy and of being made redundant. Nothing in it extends to a dismissal for performance, for conduct, or for any other reason.

A dismissal at the end of a performance plan is not a redundancy. In Irish employment law those are different grounds with different procedures, and the immigration consequence follows the same split.

So do not carry those two numbers across. They are the single most expensive thing to get wrong here, because they are accurate, findable, and about somebody else.

What notifying a redundancy actually buys

If your ending is a redundancy, the scheme is worth knowing precisely, because the four weeks are not a formality.

• Four weeks to notify. Tell the Employment Permits Section within four weeks of the redundancy, on the prescribed form.
• Six months to find work. Up to six months from the date of the redundancy to find another job and apply for a permit, subject to the normal conditions.
• What the notification buys. A later application is exempted from the Labour Market Needs Test and from the eligibility criteria in relation to the job. That exemption is the real value of the four-week step, and missing it costs more than a missed deadline usually does.
• If the six months run out, the Department sends you to Immigration Service Delivery to establish your status beyond that period.

Whether your ending is a redundancy is the first question, not the clock

This is the order of operations that makes Ireland different.

A British sponsored worker's first question is when the employer will report. An American H-1B holder's is the date employment formally ends. Yours is whether the ending can honestly be characterised as a redundancy at all, because that is what decides which set of rules you are in.

Ask it in writing and ask it early: is the employer treating this as a redundancy or as a dismissal on performance grounds. Your employer has to be able to answer for its own purposes, and the answer determines whether a documented route exists for you.

That is a question for an Irish immigration solicitor and for your employer's own account of why the job ended. It is not one this guide can answer for you.

Changing employer while the permit is still in force

Here is the part you can act on today, whichever way you expect the plan to go. It does not depend on how an ending gets characterised, because it happens before there is an ending.

Under the Employment Permits Act 2024, a General or Critical Skills permit holder can move to another employer without applying for a new permit, once nine months have passed since commencing their first permit. A General holder moves within the occupation the permit names, identified by its four-digit SOC code. A Critical Skills holder moves across a broader category identified by three digits. The permit's own duration is unaffected.

Three conditions have dates or counts in them:

• Nine months. The Minister may refuse a new permit where you have not completed nine months with your employer on your first permit in the State. The two stated exceptions are redundancy, and circumstances unforeseen at application that fundamentally change the employment relationship — a move of the business a significant distance, a significant change to hours, a significant change to the nature of the work. A performance plan is not among them.
• Two months left. The permit must be in force and have at least two months still to run when the application is made.
• Three moves. A holder may be granted at most three of these changes.

This window closes while you are still employed, not after, which is the opposite of every other clock on this page. You will also need the signed contract of employment and a Revenue statement of the new employer's monthly statutory returns, dated within the three months before the application.

What the Department's own hundred pages do not say

The Employment Permits FAQ runs to a hundred pages and was read in full. It does not address what a dismissal for performance leaves an employment permit holder with.

Every period it does carry either follows a redundancy, or runs while the person is still in the job. That is an absence somebody has read rather than a document nobody has opened, which is worth more — and it is still an absence. It is not a statement that nothing applies to you.

The second open question is the one that decides whether you are lawfully present while job hunting: whether your immigration permission ends with the employment, lapses on a timetable, or continues until a decision is made. No official source read for this page establishes it.

What to do while the plan is still running

• Check the nine-month date. Count from when you commenced your first permit in the State, not from this job. It is the gate on the change-of-employer route.
• Check how long your permit has left. Under two months and that route is closed to you.
• Start looking now. Job searching during a plan has what you can say and to whom, and in Ireland the record of the search is itself the compensation if an ending is ever weighed by the WRC.
• Keep the dates. The date you were told, the date employment ends, the date of any notification. The one scheme that is documented turns on a four-week interval between two of them.

The permission question belongs to a different office

Fairhanded is not a law firm and is not an immigration adviser.

Two things follow from this page that are worth acting on. The Department of Enterprise administers permits; it does not administer your permission to be in the State, and on its own redundancy route it hands that question to Immigration Service Delivery. So the office that can tell you whether you are lawfully present is not the one whose page you will have found first.

And the gap in the official material is real. Where the documented answer is about somebody else, the substitute is an Irish immigration solicitor early, while the characterisation of your ending is still being decided rather than after it has been written down.