The High Court has refused an anonymised applicant’s challenge to a decision denying him permission to remain under the 2022 Regularisation of Long-Term Undocumented Migrant Scheme.
Ms Justice Miriam O’Regan delivered judgment on 30 October 2025. The applicant had arrived in Ireland in September 2013 as a student and later married an EU citizen. He obtained a residence card in 2015, but the Minister later found the marriage to be one of convenience and revoked the residence permission linked to it.
While the applicant pursued a review of that decision, the Minister granted him temporary Stamp 4 permissions from August 2020 until February 2022. Those permissions expressly stated that they did not acknowledge any entitlement under EU treaty rights.
In April 2022, the applicant applied under the regularisation scheme. His application was refused because he had not been undocumented for the required four-year period before 31 January 2022, given those temporary permissions. A review upheld that refusal in November 2023.
The applicant argued that the later finding that his marriage was one of convenience should also have invalidated the temporary permissions. He also argued that the Minister had failed to explain the legal basis for granting them and had treated him differently from other applicants.
The High Court rejected those arguments. It held that the 2020 and 2021 Stamp 4 permissions were granted because a review was pending, not because of the marriage, and that they had never been revoked. The court also found that the Minister had discretion to grant those temporary permissions and that the correspondence made clear they were not EU treaty-rights permissions.
The judge followed an earlier High Court test case, MA v Minister for Justice, which had reached the same conclusion on materially similar facts.
All relief was refused. The judge provisionally indicated that the respondents should receive their costs, subject to written submissions.