The Employment Permits Portal is temporarily unavailable following the identification of suspicious unauthorised activity on elements of the system. The Department took this action to protect users and the service and to allow a full investigation to be undertaken.
Since then, the Department has been carrying out extensive investigation, remediation, security testing and assurance work. While significant progress has been made, the Portal will only reopen when the Department is satisfied that all necessary security, testing and assurance measures have been successfully completed.
Service update
Existing arrangements
Applications submitted before the Portal became unavailable continue to be processed. The Employment Permits team is continuing to assess applications and make decisions internally while the Portal remains unavailable.
Appropriate flexibility in relation to applications and associated requirements affected by the outage will apply. This includes ensuring that applicants are not disadvantaged as a result of the temporary unavailability of the service, including where normal application timelines have been impacted.
Temporary arrangements
The Department is finalising temporary arrangements for the submission of new applications, supporting documentation, reviews and other requests that would normally be made through the Portal. Details will be published on this page as soon as they are available.
Further information
The Department recognises the significant disruption this has caused for employers, employees and employment permit agents and sincerely apologises for the inconvenience.
To assist applicants, employers and employment permit agents, the FAQs below provide information on the current status of the service, the processing of employment permit applications and the measures being taken to ensure users are not disadvantaged while the Portal remains temporarily unavailable.
Employment Permits Portal - Frequently Asked Questions
Employment Permits Portal - Personal Data Security Incident
Information about employment permits
Contact points
For questions relating to the security incident, contact dataqueries.permits@enterprise.gov.ie.
For urgent employment permit application queries, contact epos@enterprise.gov.ie.
For data protection queries, contact the Department's Data Protection Officer at dataprotection@enterprise.gov.ie.
Updates on the restoration of the Employment Permits Portal and any alternative arrangements will continue to be published on this page as further information becomes available.