Should You Make a Separate Irish Will for Irish Property?

Everything else on this site is about what happens after a death. This page is about the one thing a person living abroad with Irish property can do while alive to make the Irish side of their estate simple. A separate Irish will, confined to Irish assets and drafted to sit alongside the will made at home, is the standard advice of estate practitioners on both sides of the water for anyone with Irish land or a substantial Irish holding. It is not compulsory. It is not always the right answer. But where it is, it turns the Irish grant from a cross-border exercise into a domestic one, and the executor will thank you for it.

What the Irish Grant Looks Like Without One

Where a person who lived abroad dies with Irish assets and a single home-country will, the Irish application generally waits for the home-country grant, is founded on a sealed and certified copy of it, and may need a certified translation and an affidavit from a foreign lawyer on the validity of the will under the law of domicile. If the executor is abroad, the papers are sworn before a notary and couriered. If there was no home-country grant because the estate there was small, the Irish application stands alone and needs the affidavit of law regardless. Each of those steps is routine and each adds weeks. The sequence is set out in probate in Ireland from England and US letters testamentary and Irish assets.

What It Looks Like With One

With a valid Irish will confined to Irish assets, the Irish application can be made immediately on the death, without waiting for anything to happen abroad. The will is in English, in the Irish form, with an executor chosen for the Irish job. The Probate Office is looking at a document it sees every day. The non-resident rules still apply, including the requirement to appoint an Irish solicitor where the applicant and a beneficiary are abroad, and the Revenue Statement of Affairs and the PPS-number applications still have to be done; the PPS number bottleneck does not disappear. But the foreign-document layer, which is where most cross-border delay lives, is gone.

What the Irish Will Must Say, and Must Not

The Irish will states that it deals only with the testator’s assets in Ireland and that it does not revoke any will dealing with assets elsewhere. Its revocation clause is confined to earlier wills so far as they relate to Irish assets. The home-country will is then amended, or drafted, to say the mirror image: that it does not deal with Irish assets and that its revocation clause does not touch any Irish will. The two solicitors see each other’s drafts, and the order of signing is recorded. Skipping any of these is how the accident described in when a foreign will accidentally revokes the Irish one happens, and it happens often enough that it is the first thing we check when a client abroad tells us they have “a will at home”.

The Irish will should also be drafted with Irish succession law in view, because Irish law governs Irish land regardless of where the owner lived. A spouse’s legal right share and a child’s right to apply under section 117 attach to Irish property whatever a foreign will or a foreign legal system might say about them, and a will that ignores them invites the dispute it was meant to prevent. The way Irish protections meet foreign estates is in Irish statutory rights in foreign estates.

Signing It From Abroad

An Irish will does not have to be signed in Ireland. It is valid if executed with Irish formalities, which are writing, the testator’s signature at the end, and two witnesses present together who then sign in the testator’s presence; and Irish law also accepts a will executed in accordance with the formalities of the place where it is signed. We prepare the will and a one-page set of signing instructions, the client signs before two independent adult witnesses where they live, neither of whom benefits under the will, and the original comes back to us by tracked courier for safe keeping. A video call before signing deals with questions. A copy goes to the home-country solicitor for their file.

Keeping the Two Wills in Step

Two wills are two documents to maintain. A marriage revokes an Irish will unless it was made in contemplation of that marriage, as explained in marriage revokes a will, and the same event may or may not affect the home-country will. A divorce, a new child, the sale of the Irish property or the purchase of another all call for a check. The discipline is simple: whenever either will is reviewed, both are. Clients who tell both solicitors about each other, and keep a note of which will is which, never have the problem.