Europe by Ancestry: The Passport in Your Family Tree

Irish citizenship by descent is the exception: every other route on this site asks what you earn or how old you are, while this one asks who your grandparents were. Several European countries grant citizenship by descent, and for Canadians — a country built from Irish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Greek and other European diasporas — it is quietly the most powerful route of all: citizenship, not a permit. No income threshold, no age limit, no expiry. But the rules differ sharply by country, and one major country changed them in 2025 in ways most websites still have not caught up with.

Ireland — the cleanest Irish citizenship by descent claim in Europe

• Parent born in Ireland? You are already an Irish citizen. Apply for the passport.
• Grandparent born anywhere on the island of Ireland? You qualify to register on the Foreign Births Register (FBR). Government fee €278; processing runs about 9–12 months; there is no residence requirement and no language test.
• Timing matters for your children: your own registration must be complete before your children are born for them to claim through you. Registering is therefore worth doing years before you think you need it.
• The documents are the work: long-form birth, marriage and death certificates linking you, generation by generation, to that Irish-born grandparent. Canada holds a large Irish diaspora — if the surname and the stories are in your family, this check costs little and can return an EU passport.

Italy — read this before you believe any website

Italy used to be famous for unlimited-generation descent claims. That ended in 2025. Under Law 74/2025, applications filed after 27 March 2025 generally require a parent or grandparent who held exclusively Italian citizenship (or an Italian parent who lived in Italy for two years before your birth). Great-grandparent-only claims no longer qualify for most people born abroad. Any service still selling “your great-great-grandfather makes you Italian” is selling a rule that no longer exists — eligibility triage comes first here, optimism later.

Elsewhere, briefly

• Portugal: a Portuguese parent is straightforward; grandparent claims exist with additional ties/language elements.
• Spain: descent through a Spanish parent; the wider Democratic Memory route for grandchildren closed on 22 October 2025 — residence-based routes remain.
• Poland, Greece, Germany: real but case-specific (including German restoration cases for families affected by Nazi-era denaturalisation). These reward a document review, not a guess.

How we approach it

Ancestry work is genealogy with legal consequences: verify eligibility against the current law first, then build the paper chain (vital records in Canada and Europe, apostilles, certified translations), then file. Get the order wrong and families spend thousands proving a claim the law no longer recognises — the Italian change made that a live risk, not a hypothetical. Start with the eligibility question for Irish citizenship by descent, not the family tree: the law in force when you file decides whether the paper chain is worth building.

Rules checked 28 October 2026 against official sources (Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs; Italy’s Law 74/2025). Descent law changes by statute and court ruling; a claim is only as good as its documents and the law in force when it is filed. For Ireland, Irish citizenship by descent claims start with the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Foreign Births Register page, which sets out who can register and what to file.

The other routes