Brussels IV and the Irish Opt-Out

In 2015 the EU did something genuinely ambitious with inheritance law: the Succession Regulation — Brussels IV — gave participating states one law per estate, a testator’s choice of national law, and a Certificate of Succession that travels. It works. And then the estate contains a cottage in Clare or an account in Dublin, and the file meets the clause everyone forgets: Ireland opted out.

One Estate, Two Regimes

Inside the Regulation’s zone, the estate runs on a single law — habitual residence by default, nationality by election. At the Irish border the logic changes systems: Ireland applies its traditional conflict rules — Irish immovables governed by Irish law as the place they sit, movables generally by domicile — and requires an Irish grant for substantial Irish assets, because no foreign authority has direct effect here and nothing is resealed. The practical shape is two limbs run in parallel: the Regulation administration at home, and the Irish limb with its own machinery — entitlement mapped through the foreign-domicile rules, PPS numbers, the SA.2, the required-solicitor categories that European elements reliably trigger.

Where the Choice-of-Law Clause Meets the Wall

The Regulation’s signature feature — electing one’s national law — binds participating states and does not bind Ireland: Irish land answers to Irish succession law whatever the will elected, which means the carefully unified European plan can fracture at precisely its Irish asset, and Irish overrides — the statutory-rights analysis chief among them — can reach property the home plan treated as fully disposed. The Certificate of Succession, likewise, is a strong exhibit in the Irish file but never a key to Irish doors. The planning moral is blunt: European portfolios containing Irish property need Irish advice before death, not after — and the probate moral is the practice’s standing method: both limbs mapped at the start, run in parallel, with lanes kept clean between home counsel, Irish counsel and the tax advisers on each side. The full architecture lives at international probate; European correspondent instructions land at the foreign-lawyer service.