Ireland visa guideIreland is an EU member but is not part of the Schengen Area. A Ireland visa does not let you travel on to Schengen countries, and time spent here is counted separately from your Schengen 90/180 days.
What this page is, and what it is not
This is an informational reference to Ireland's main work-permit pathways: the Critical Skills Employment Permit, the General Employment Permit and Stamp 1G. Lifeset Overseas does not process work permits: see the disclaimer at the top of this page. We hold a Punjab travel-professional consultancy licence, not an MEA Recruiting Agent licence under the Emigration Act, and arranging overseas employment requires the latter.
We publish this because half the harm done to families in Punjab comes from not understanding how these systems work. If you can read the structure below, you can tell a genuine offer from a fraud.
The single most important thing to understand
In Ireland, a work permit is not something you buy and not something an agent can hand you. It starts with an employer, and the employer carries most of the process. Anyone who offers to sell you a job, a sponsorship, a nomination or a permit for a fee is describing something that does not legally exist in the way they are presenting it.
If someone asks you for money to "arrange" employment abroad, ask them for their MEA Recruiting Agent registration number and verify it before you part with anything. We do not hold one, which is precisely why we will not take this work.
How the pathway actually runs
The steps below are the real sequence. Note how much of it happens before you personally apply for anything. That shape is the tell. A process that starts with you paying a fee is not this process.
What we can help with instead
We cannot help you with a work permit. We can help you with:
- Study routes to Ireland and elsewhere, which in several countries lead to post-study work rights in their own right
- Visitor and family visas
- Permanent-residence routes that are points-based rather than employer-sponsored
- Refusal recovery: CAIPS/GCMS notes, understanding what actually went wrong, and rebuilding a file
If a work permit is genuinely your goal, take this page as background and speak to a firm that holds the right licence.
Before you trust any figure
Salary thresholds, fees, occupation lists and quotas in this area change at least annually, and often mid-year. This page deliberately describes the structure rather than printing numbers that would quietly go stale. For current figures, always read enterprise.gov.ie and irishimmigration.ie directly. Not an agent's screenshot, and not this page.
Official sources
- Immigration Service Delivery, Ireland: https://www.irishimmigration.ie/
- VFS Global India, Ireland: https://visa.vfsglobal.com/ind/en/irl
Fees and rules change; the official page always prevails. The guide above was written from our filing experience for Indian applicants; check the current requirements on the authority’s site before you book.
