Died Abroad, No Will, Assets in Ireland

The hardest version of the cross-border estate is the quietest: no will anywhere — the deceased domiciled abroad, the Irish assets sitting behind an intestacy that must be administered under two legal systems at once. It is more layered than the testate file, fully mechanical once mapped, and mapped here.

Two Maps, One Estate

The governing split is the cross-border rule in its purest form: Irish immovables pass under Irish intestacy rules whatever the domicile; movables pass under the domicile’s intestacy rules. Since intestacy regimes differ genuinely — spousal shares, children’s portions, siblings’ and parents’ positions, cohabitants’ treatment — the Irish house and the Irish bank account in the same estate can distribute by different maps. Everything therefore starts with domicile: a legal conclusion built from a life’s facts, not a line on a death certificate, and worth establishing carefully because both maps hang from it.

The Grant: Entitlement Looks Outward First

The Irish grant of administration goes, ordinarily, to whoever the home jurisdiction entrusted — proved by a sealed copy of the foreign appointment — or, where nothing issued abroad, to those entitled under the domicile’s law (movables) and Irish law (the land), evidenced where needed by an affidavit of foreign law. Two structural facts frame the application: this configuration is one of the Probate Office’s named required-solicitor categories, and the wider non-resident machinery — the solicitor-as-agent rule, PPS numbers for the foreign parties — applies on top, all attacked in parallel from day one as the international practice standard.

Before Intestacy Is Assumed — and When Families Split

Intestacy is a conclusion, not a starting assumption: the documented will search comes first (registries, lawyers, banks, papers, on both sides of the water), because the will surfacing after distribution is this story’s expensive ending — and the rumoured-but-missing will has its own machinery of presumptions and proof. And where the family splits over who administers, or watches the Irish relative with suspicion from abroad, the answer is structure rather than hope: entitlement machinery, negotiated neutral administrators, and duties enforceable across any distance — the practice’s two halves working the same file, as ever.