GNIB - your experience?

Little CuChulainn · 29-09-2015 08:00PM

Isn't there immigration Gardaí in every Garda district outside of Dublin? Why are people travelling from Carlow to Burgh Quay? In any case, the place seems to be run terribly. They send people to local Garda stations to get passports verified (which isn't done in stations any more) even though the person will be bringing the passport in with them. Like most government organisations it is full of ridiculous amounts of red tape.

Dr.Internet · 29-09-2015 08:14PM

They have 6? Free to send to Syria to process applications on site

Can't remember if it was 6or 9 that's going

It's a farce of the highest order

billyhead · 29-09-2015 08:28PM

There to seems to be an anti civil service agenda going on here. I doubt the treatment given out to customers is as bad as people make out. As another poster said if you have all your paperwork in order it will be a smooth process. Also its not the staffs fault that people prefer to queue over night. They can only get through so many applications as possible and they have to follow strict protocols with each application. Don't take its lack of efficiency out on the staff.

josip · 29-09-2015 08:44PM

billyhead wrote: »

There to seems to be an anti civil service agenda going on here. I doubt the treatment given out to customers is as bad as people make out. As another poster said if you have all your paperwork in order it will be a smooth process. Also its not the staffs fault that people prefer to queue over night. They can only get through so many applications as possible and they have to follow strict protocols with each application. Don't take its lack of efficiency out on the staff.

I have no agenda and I don't know whether the people we were dealing with were civil servants or Gardai or some other type of public servant. I just remember them as rude, brusque and they gave the impression that they'd rather be doing any other job than having to deal with all these applicants.

On what basis do you doubt some posters yet believe others?

Also, people don't "prefer" to queue overnight as you chose to put it.
They have no choice other than to queue over night.

Fr_Dougal · 29-09-2015 09:03PM

Is this another one of your US=great, Ireland=sh1t threads, OP? They get tiring.

Wompa1 · 29-09-2015 09:11PM

Martial9 wrote: »

The US embassy in Ballsbridge do pretty much the exact same thing. Give a hundred odd people the same appointment time. You all queue up outside, in you go and get patted down by an armed guard or 'agent', put your belongings through the detectors, they confiscate your phone, you get a ticket and wait for ages for your number to be called.

Currently dealing with the GNIB with a family member. No issues. Have all your paperwork in order and you will be grand.

True! Have a US passport. Would have to go to Dublin to get it renewed. There would be a huge line of people for their opening time. Then they would shout, "any US citizens?" and I would saunter to the top of the line like the Cat that got the Canary...not really, I was embarrassed about skipping everybody but that's how they did it.

The people inside are pleasant enough, though. Not rude.

newacc2015 · 29-09-2015 09:11PM

Most of their people are on annual "student visas". There is well over 10k Brazilians plus countless Mexicans and Venezuelans here to "learn English", that werent here years ago. The UK tightened up their visas rules and the US/Canadians doesnt want of them studying English their(the Visa rules basically rule it out for them). So we have all of these people here to "learn English", but most importantly to take advance of extremely liberal work rules for "students". You cant blame the GNIB for having massive queues for having to process over 20k more "students" than previous years.

I think its horrific they couldn't fast track genieue third level students who are paying tens of thousands to actually study here for the year. There is a lot of pissed off American students here for a semester who wont get to do any of the travel they want to do

grundie · 30-09-2015 10:21AM

It's a mess. My wife has to run the GNIB gauntlet every 5 years. If you aren't in the queue by 6:00am (or even earlier!) you probably wont get a ticket for that day.

Once you have a ticket you could be lucky and have a low numbered ticket and get seen soon, otherwise you could be waiting all day.

Plus the waiting area is grim, very grim.

The thing is it would be easy to fix. Its basically appointment management. Bring in an online booking system tied in to a decent form processing workflow system.

seagull · 30-09-2015 01:24PM

Little CuChulainn wrote: »

Isn't there immigration Gardaí in every Garda district outside of Dublin?

There used to be. We were able to go to the garda station in Balbriggan, and it made life far more civilised. Then they went back to having everything centralised.

grundie wrote: »

It's a mess. My wife has to run the GNIB gauntlet every 5 years. If you aren't in the queue by 6:00am (or even earlier!) you probably wont get a ticket for that day.

Once you have a ticket you could be lucky and have a low numbered ticket and get seen soon, otherwise you could be waiting all day.

Plus the waiting area is grim, very grim.

The thing is it would be easy to fix. Its basically appointment management. Bring in an online booking system tied in to a decent form processing workflow system.

Join the queue at 6 am, and you'll probably be about 50 people back from the door when they say the quota is done for the day. To get a low numbered ticket, you need to be there from 1 am at the latest.

They should also have separate queues depending on what you're there for. It's far quicker to go through a renewal based on marriage to an EU citizen than to go through an entirely new application.

GNIB - your experience?

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