A Diplomatic Matter - Getting a New German Passport in Ireland

One of the inescapable facts of living in a country that’s different from your place of birth is that you can’t just hop down to the local city hall or municipal office and apply for a new passport or ID card when you need one. I had gotten a new passport back in Germany literally days before emigrating to Ireland in 2012 and, as 2022 dawned, it was time to get a replacement, since my existing passport would expire in early August. So, I did what seemed natural and checked the website of the German Embassy in Dublin for details. The experience from that point onwards was pretty “German”, to put it diplomatically. 

Pretty much everything had to be printed out and brought to the embassy, though most of the stuff was at least somewhat understandable. The passport photos had to be provided in physical form, which I guess makes sense. Utility bills as a proof of address were also understandable, especially since Ireland does not operate a central registry system like Germany. Still, I can’t understand why a country as technologically advanced as Germany isn’t able to at least partially automate the system, such as checking for birth certificates automatically after an applicant has entered their details on the embassy website. Speaking of birth certificates, that turned into a whole other rigamarole that I’ll write about further down. For now, there was more fun to be had.

Putting the paperwork aside for a second, the embassy required an appointment for every passport application, one that had to be booked online. Okay, that makes sense, both the appointment and the online reservation. The German Embassy in Ireland isn’t the largest one out there, apparently there are only around twenty staff assigned to the embassy, including the ambassador himself, so there’s not a lot of space and the ID Card & Passport section isn’t exactly massive either. Plus, there’s the security aspect. Ireland may be a geopolitical backwater, but that doesn’t mean that the embassy isn’t a potential target. The spectre of the 1975 siege of the German Embassy in Stockholm is likely still present in the German Foreign Office. 

The online booking system itself reminded me more of the beginnings of my own blog than of what you would expect from a modern government website. 2010 called, they want their web design standards back. Seriously, the entire system looks completely obsolete and is in desperate need of a redesign. What’s worse, when I first tried, there were no appointments available at all! What’s more, the embassy stated on its website that it would only accept passport or ID Card applications for documents that had expired or were due to expire the following month. This was problematic, to say the least. Traveling to Germany wasn’t an issue, I’m a German citizen after all, but both returning home to Ireland and travelling to some of the other countries I cover as part of my job could be impeded, since several of these countries expected a passport that is valid for more than six months. So yeah, thanks a lot for that. In the end, it turned out to be a moot point, since there were no appointments available anyway.

It was only on the last day of May 2022 that I finally managed to secure an appointment at the embassy for June. It was far too close for comfort to the expiration of my existing passport, as well as falling right into the middle of End of Quarter review season, the busiest time of the year for my team, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. So, I booked it, booked my train tickets to Dublin and back, and set about getting all the miscellaneous pieces of paperwork. My employer would just need to do without me for a single day. To be fair, they were totally cool with it. I guess everyone knows what it’s like to have to deal with government bureaucracy.

With that out of the way, it was time to get my birth certificate. I know I had a copy in my personal files, but I was not sure whether that would be accepted, so I had to reach out to my place of birth. A place that I’d had no dealings with for almost thirty years. As it turns out, the city administration had actually launched a website to request a copy of your certificate online, something that I found out after emailing the city. There was only one little issue: The website didn’t work! It didn’t work on my work machine, it didn’t work on my private MacBook or on my iPad, regardless of browser. It took hours for me to find out that any requests from non-German IP addresses were being blocked. To give credit where credit is due, once I’d managed to request the certificate with the help of a proxy server, it took less than a week for the certificates to actually arrive in my mailbox. That’s faster than a lot of Amazon Prime deliveries, so well done on that front. With that issue out of the way, and all other paperwork already in my possession, all that was left was to ship off to Dublin.

Getting to the bus stop at Kent Station was an odyssey in its own right!

Kent Station itself really hasn't changed much, apart from new displays and signage.

This turned out to be a bit of a harrowing experience in its own right. I was still dealing with my leg injury that I’d picked up in Munich, so when Bus Eireann did their usual thing of not giving a damn about customer connections, the prospect of limping all the way to the train station wasn’t really something I relished. Still, I managed to make it with ten minutes to spare. To be fair, the rest of the trip was a whole lot easier, and I even had quite a lot of space to spread out on the train. Once in Dublin, the usual connection of LUAS from Dublin Houston to Connolly and the DART suburban train from Connolly to Booterstown both worked like a charm!

Hey, if you have to do it, you might as well blog about it ;) 

I'll say this much for Booterstown: The view from the DART station is always a treat!

The German Embassy is quintessentially German: Eminently practical, but hardly a beauty!

As for the embassy itself, despite seemingly undergoing reconstruction for years, it still stuck out like a sore thumb in the rather posh suburban environment of Booterstown. I’d been to the embassy before in 2018 to deal with some inheritance issues, so I was vaguely familiar with some of the procedures. All electronics needed to be locked in a locker at the gate to the embassy compound. I was then directed to a new waiting room, one that hadn’t been there during my previous visit. Not only was the waiting room new, it looks as if the entire consular and Passport/Visa department had gotten a makeover. The procedure itself turned out to be quick and efficient, including taking scans of my fingerprints for the biometric information. All in all, I was through in less than twenty minutes. A six-hour round trip for such a minor formality. And thanks to Irish Rail’s newly restrictive ticket conditions, I didn’t even have time for a shopping spree in Dublin.

My ride home, the same as my ride to Dublin.

The Mark IV coaches are beginning to show their age, though I still think they're pretty good-looking trains.

They're also surprisingly comfortable!

Either way, less than four weeks after my trip to Dublin, I was able to pick up my new passport from the local post office. So the extra money paid for express handling actually turned out to be a good investment. Of course, as luck would have it, my ongoing health issues have prevented me from using it so far, but the turnaround was surprisingly fast. Now I just have to repeat the experience for my ID card, ideally sometime in October. I just don’t like not having a backup ID.

And that's what it was all about: A six-hour round trip for a twenty minute appointment just to get this in the mail four weeks later...

I wonder how many passport and visa scammers are going to spam the comment section for this blog post?