The High Court has quashed a decision to revoke the residence card of a Moroccan woman whose family returned to Ireland after spending about 20 months abroad during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The applicants, Talal Tahir and Nadia Aknaf, are a married couple. The husband is a UK national and the wife is Moroccan. She obtained an EU-derived residence card in November 2019 while the United Kingdom was still an EU member state for free-movement purposes.
The family left Ireland in March 2020 and returned permanently on 30 November 2021. They said their absence followed housing difficulties which had left them living in emergency hotel accommodation, a temporary move to the UK for respite, pandemic lockdowns, the wife’s pregnancy and difficulties involving children who had been stranded in Morocco.
The Minister first revoked the residence card in November 2022. Following a review, that decision was affirmed on 17 September 2024.
Mr Justice Garrett Simons held that the review decision did not adequately explain why the card was being revoked. In the judicial review proceedings, the Minister argued that an absence exceeding 12 months had irreversibly broken the family’s continuity of residence under the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. The court found that this asserted primary reason was not stated in the seven-page decision itself.
The judgment also identified internal inconsistencies. Different parts of the administrative process referred to March 2020, October 2020 and November 2022 as relevant dates without explaining their relationship.
The Minister had also recorded evidence that the family returned to Ireland, rented accommodation, enrolled their children in school and that the husband worked here. Yet the decision did not explain why that evidence failed to establish resumed residence, or why six journeys between Dublin and London supported a finding that the family’s main centre of interest was in the UK.
The court rejected the Minister’s argument that quashing the decision would be futile. The legal effect of the family’s absence under the Withdrawal Agreement remained arguable and had not been authoritatively resolved.
The decision was therefore quashed and the residence-card issue was remitted for fresh consideration with adequate reasons.