The most common inheritance problem in Ireland isn’t a bad will — it’s a stalled one: the executor who took the grant and then took up residence in silence, the house nobody will sell, the accounts nobody will show, the sibling who treats the office as ownership. Beneficiaries endure this for years believing nothing can be done. Almost everything can be done.
Most people arrive at these pages while grieving. We run these files with that in mind: plain answers, no pressure, and matters moved forward so you don’t have to carry the process as well as the loss.
The Duties, and the Year
Executors hold the estate as fiduciaries: gather with diligence, protect and never profit, keep and give proper accounts, act even-handedly, distribute according to law — with personal liability attaching to loss caused by maladministration. The law’s timing benchmark is the executor’s year: twelve months of reasonable latitude, after which distribution can be compelled and delay must explain itself. The year is a shield against premature demands, not a licence for drift — and the beneficiary’s single most useful act, from today, is the timeline in writing: what was asked, when, and what silence answered. Where the delay is actually the Probate Office rather than the person, the diagnosis differs entirely — that page separates the two.
The Machinery, in Escalating Order
- The framed letter: duties named, timeline recited, specific demands (accounts, the sale, distribution) with consequences attached — this alone moves most stuck estates, because most executors are drifting, not defrauding;
- Citations: where the named executor hasn’t even extracted the grant — take probate or step aside, on the court’s compulsion;
- Compulsion within the estate: applications to compel accounts and due administration where a grant exists and nothing follows it;
- Removal and revocation: the court replacing the personal representative — delay, conflict, misconduct, deadlock — typically with an independent administrator who simply finishes the job. Not granted lightly; transformative where granted, and often decisive merely by being credibly prepared.
Costs discipline runs through all of it: maladministration costs can be visited on executors personally, which is precisely why the well-documented beneficiary’s letter carries the weight it does. And where the stalled estate hides a deeper dispute — the will itself, the emptied accounts — the wider map is at contesting a will and joint accounts & lifetime transfers.
Time limits in estate disputes are among the strictest in Irish law — a section 117 claim must be brought within six months of the grant issuing, and the court cannot extend it. Other claims run on their own clocks, some short, some with extensions. Never assume you are out of time, and never assume you have time: take advice promptly. Nothing on this page is legal advice for your situation.
How Long Has It Been?
Bring the timeline - the grant date, the requests, the silences. One confidential call maps which rung of the machinery your estate has reached.
Call 01 5827148