[Updated] This app eases the immigration process in Ireland
A software for those who need to deal with bureaucracy
[Update: 11 Nov 2018] It appears this app is no longer available. [/Update]
One of the first ordeals for any exchange student or immigrant in Ireland is to face the Garda National Immigration Bureau, best known as GNIB. It’s the place where you ask for permanence, and they are the ones responsible for telling if you stay or go home.
However, before being assessed, you need to be able to get in the building. Until the second half of 2016, this was only possible if you spent the dawn queuing outside waiting for the moment that an official would come to distribute the tickets for the lucky ones. After that, the candidate would spend more hours waiting to be heard, some would even go to school or work and come back later — at my first time, I stayed at the GNIB for seven hours.
The government solved the street lines problem when it introduced, last September, a system for online booking. But the queue didn’t disappear, it was only transferred to a virtual environment, and this caused a new issue: since the platform can only book within ten weeks, the appointments evaporate fast. Depending on withdraws and the workflow, the GNIB makes more appointments available every day from 2:30 p.m., so the candidate needs to go to the website every day, fill in the same forms and insistently click on the “send” button until an appointment shows up (if it shows up).
It came from a Brazilian the initiative to simplify things. Last Thursday, 2, Ranieri Pieper went to Facebook in order to talk about “GNIB — Ireland”. Available only for Android, the app automates the registration process and even keeps looking for appointments for the user. All you have to do is to fill in your info once and activate the notification system; when there is an appointment, an alert will appear on the screen of your smartphone.
I haven’t talked to Mr Pieper about the idea, but he said in his post that he’d developed the app for himself. “I arrived in Ireland some time ago and faced the booking problems to get the GNIB [card]”, he wrote. “Because I know that a lot of people face this situation, I decided to make the app available on Google Play for those interested.”
Answering to other users, Mr Pieper also informed that his speciality is Google’s operational system, so the odds of a launch for iPhone are minimal. But it’s a start, and maybe the idea will encourage the government itself to consider a similar solution.
Leonardo Pereira is a Brazilian journalist located in Dublin. He is a senior writer and proofreader at Olhar Digital and can be found on the Internet as @leeopereira.
