The Non-Resident Executor of an Irish Estate

The letter arrives in London, New Jersey or Perth: you are the executor, and somewhere in the estate sits an Irish asset — the account never closed, the shares never sold, the home place never transferred. The home-country probate you dutifully completed doesn’t touch it. What follows is the honest map of the Irish limb: what the law requires of you, where the delays actually come from, and how much of it never requires you to leave home.

The Threshold Question: Is an Irish Grant Needed at All?

Small Irish holdings sometimes release without a grant — institutions apply their own thresholds, and modest balances can move on death certificates and indemnities. Above the working threshold of roughly €20,000, and always for Irish land and buildings, a fresh Irish grant is required: Ireland does not reseal foreign grants, a rule with its own logic and its own article — why Ireland won’t reseal your foreign grant. The first task on any cross-border file is therefore an asset schedule with values at death: it decides whether the Irish limb is a full application or a set of release letters.

Where the Solicitor Requirement Bites

The non-resident executor meets a rule most domestic executors never encounter: where the applicant is abroad and a non-spouse beneficiary of €20,000+ is also abroad, appointing an Irish solicitor is mandatory before the grant issues — the solicitor standing as agent for the estate’s Irish tax compliance, a role with real teeth on the solicitor’s side. The Probate Office adds its own required-solicitor categories for foreign-domicile intestacies, foreign-language wills and unproved wills, plus a general discretion. The honest framing: for most estates that justify this article, the question isn’t whether to instruct in Ireland but how early — and early wins, because of what comes next.

The Real Timeline — and the PPSN Bottleneck

The Irish Probate Office itself now moves in weeks rather than months for clean applications. The cross-border delay lives earlier: PPS numbers for people who never lived in Ireland (the SA.2 demands them, obtaining them is a documentary queue of its own), foreign documents needing certified translations or notarised swearing, and the court-sealed copy of the foreign grant working its way out of a registry abroad. The well-run file attacks all of these in parallel from day one — and keeps names and details identical across every document, because rejected applications lose their queue place entirely.

After the Grant: Selling and Distributing From Abroad

The grant is the key, not the finish: accounts close, registrars transfer, and Irish property sells through an ordinary Irish conveyance run alongside the estate — signatures couriered, funds moved through the client account, the executor never leaving home. Distribution abroad then closes the file, with the standing rule stated plainly: we do not advise on tax — Irish CAT can reach Irish assets whoever holds them and wherever the beneficiaries live, cross-border estates raise double-taxation questions, and those belong with the accountants and tax advisers on each side, working alongside the legal file. The full speciality — who we act for, the document lists, the foreign-lawyer agency service — lives on the international probate practice page.