Redact your IRP card: black out what they don't need to see

If you’re living here on a non-EEA passport, the Irish Residence Permit is the card people keep asking you to photograph, starting with a new employer and often a letting agent. Each time, the same picture goes out: your face, signature, birth date and immigration permission, all on one piece of plastic.

The tool above opens that picture in your browser and puts solid black boxes over what you pick, so the card isn’t uploaded anywhere. If a copy has to stay whole, you can stamp the recipient and the month across your IRP instead, or cover first and stamp after.

How to redact an IRP card in three steps

1. Add a photo or scan of the card

Lay the card on something dark and shoot it square on, away from a ceiling light that puts glare across the plastic. JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC and PDF all open. Adjust crop straightens a card shot at an angle, and each side of the IRP is a separate image.

2. Cover what nobody asked for

The IRP isn’t one of the layouts the tool knows field by field, so it works from the printed labels and numbers it manages to read. Where it finds one you get a chip, and each tap switches that detail between covered and shown. Show everything lifts every box at once.

Anything left bare gets Redact by hand: drag with the mouse or a finger. On this card that tends to mean the signature, the number beside it, the small back photo and the lines at its foot. With no template behind it, I wouldn’t trust a first pass without View larger.

3. Download the redacted copy

Pick PNG, JPG or PDF. The boxes go into the pixels, and the file is written fresh without the original photo’s metadata, so no phone model or GPS position travels with it. Scanned bundles can hide more, as the guide to metadata in PDF and Word files shows.

What’s printed on an Irish Residence Permit, front and back

Immigration Service Delivery (ISD), part of the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, posts the card out once you’ve registered. ISD describes it as a credit-card sized plastic card showing your name, signature, photo, date of birth and registration number, a short note of your permission with its stamp, and a microchip.

That chip holds your photo, fingerprints and personal details, but a photo of the card only shows the printed surface. ISD’s specimen of the current design also prints “This IRP is not an identity card” right on the front, a line I’d happily point to when someone treats the IRP as a passport substitute.

Banks and solicitors who want photo ID usually mean the passport, and covering the passport data page follows the same thinking. Here is a made-up IRP mapped field by field.

Card number, registration number or GNIB number: which is which on an IRP

Forms rarely say which IRP number they mean, and the card carries three. The card number, a letter and seven digits on ISD’s specimen, sits top right of the front and again under IRL. The registration number opens the remarks on the back, after the words “Registration No”.

ISD’s glossary gives “GNIB card” as an older name for the certificate of registration, now the IRP. So a form still asking for a GNIB number most likely wants the registration number. The six-digit figure beside the signature is a third number that ISD doesn’t explain, which is reason enough for me to box it.

The machine-readable lines on the back of an IRP

The foot of the back carries three lines of capital letters, digits and chevrons for document readers. They look like noise. They repeat the card number, your registration number, date of birth, sex, expiry date, nationality and full name, so one untouched line can undo a carefully boxed front.

We checked the four check digits on ISD’s specimen on 7 November 2026. Each weights the characters 7, 3, 1 in turn, counts A to Z as 10 to 35 and chevrons as 0, and keeps the last digit of the sum. All four match, as do the fictional lines below.

My own rule is simple: if nobody has asked for the back, it never gets photographed. The Irish Passport Card uses the same three-line, 30-character format, and the Passport Card guide covers the version on its back.

Stamp 4, Stamp 1G and the rest: what your IRP stamp tells an employer

The type of permit on the front is your stamp, and the remarks on the back put its conditions into words. ISD’s own specimen, a Stamp 0, reads “Cannot work or engage in business” and “No access to public services or benefits”. That wording is why HR wants the card.

Stamp 1G catches people out because two groups share it. A graduate on the Third Level Graduate Programme can work full time but can’t be self-employed, for 12 months, with a possible further 12 after a master’s. A partner of a Critical Skills Employment Permit holder can work without an employment permit at all.

A stamp rarely makes the lists of identifiers worth removing from a document, yet it says plenty: Stamp 2 marks you as a student, and Stamp 4 can point to a marriage, an Irish child or refugee status. Sending my card to a landlord or a gym, I’d box the stamp first.

Stamp 4 is often taken for permanent residence, and it isn’t. ISD describes it as permission to stay for a specified period, renewed before it expires, and lists long term residence as one route to it. Stamp 5, granted “without condition as to time”, is the one valid up to your passport’s expiry.

Right to work, renting, banking: who can ask to see your IRP

Begin with the question the other side is answering. An employer checks your right to work. A landlord checks who you are, and only once you’ve been offered the place. A bank verifies your identity under the money laundering law. Each needs a different slice of the card.

What follows is my reading of what ISD, the DPC and the 2010 Act say, not advice on your own permission. Anything about your conditions or a refused renewal is a question for ISD itself or an immigration solicitor, and this page can’t settle it.

IRP renewal: the 12-week rule and what to send your employer

Renewals are where copies multiply. Citizens Information says the online system opens once fewer than 12 weeks remain on your permission. ISD then issues a receipt with an OREG application number, and an approval email once the renewal goes through.

If the card expires while you wait, ISD’s Notice to Employers lets you stay and work on its existing conditions for up to 12 weeks, provided you applied before it ran out and uploaded everything, including any employment permit. Apply after expiry and the notice doesn’t cover you at all.

For HR, the pairing that makes sense to me is the receipt plus a redacted copy of the old card, with name, photo, stamp and expiry readable. The OREG email itself stays untouched, since it’s the proof. Send the passport copy they may also want the same careful way.

Sending an IRP copy, and when the card itself must go

Keep one clean scan of both sides somewhere private, because the online renewal wants the whole card and hardly anyone else does. Citizens Information says a soft copy of your IRP isn’t acceptable for travel, so a boxed-out picture never has to do a job at the border.

When a request just says “send your IRP”, reply asking which details they need. I’d rather send that one line than the whole card, then use their portal instead of WhatsApp and clear the extra copies off my phone once it’s dealt with.

On the other side of the desk, people in HR or an immigration practice read remarks for a living, and it’s tempting to paste a candidate’s conditions into an AI tool for a quick summary. Nonimo takes the name and numbers out before it’s sent, and the conditions still read the same.

Sources

• Immigration Service Delivery, Irish Residence Permit, irishimmigration.ie. What the card shows, the microchip, not an identity card, specimen of the 2022 design.
• Immigration Service Delivery, immigration permission stamps, irishimmigration.ie. Conditions for Stamps 0, 1, 1G, 2, 2A, 3 and 4.
• Citizens Information, registration of non-EEA nationals, citizensinformation.ie. Renewal uploads, the 12-week window, soft copies and travel, stamp table.
• gov.ie, get a PPS number, gov.ie. Identity and address evidence for non-EU applicants.
• Data Protection Commission, requesting personal data from prospective tenants, dataprotection.ie. Offer stage and the letting agency case study.
• Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Act 2010, section 33, Law Reform Commission revised Acts. Customer identity verification.
• CCPC, opening a bank account, ccpc.ie. Examples of proof of identity.
• Immigration Service Delivery, glossary of immigration terms. GNIB card as an older name for the certificate of registration.
• Immigration Service Delivery, Notice to Employers. Up to 12 weeks on existing conditions after expiry, if the renewal went in before it.

Checked on 7 November 2026.