By Chinedu Onyejelem

Ireland’s Business Permission programme, which was suspended on 16 March last, will not be restarted till further notice – despite the completion of a review several months ago.

Although no reason was given for the continued pause of the programme, the Department of Justice said prospective investors should consider the scheme’s alternatives, the Immigrant Investor and Start Up Entrepreneur programmes.

However, neither scheme is accepting new applications until 2 January 2017 in order to clear a backlog.

A spokesperson said it is expected that dates when applications will be accepted will be posted on the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS) website throughout 2017 “in order to better manage the application process”.

Asked about the success of the schemes, Justice did not state the overall number of applications made over the years, but said about 210 applications have so far been approved, while 70 were refused since the programmes were launched nearly five years ago.

As of 7 December, a total of 480 applications had been received for the evaluation meetings, while currently there are 366 applications at varying stages of processing.