timescales in Ireland for processing intestate case

K

kushmonster

Guest
Hi there,

Firstly, any responses to my questions will be greatly appreciated.

background to my question: My father died 3 years ago and left his estate in intestate. My sister and myself are due to be the only beneficiaries of his estate. We both live in England but the intestacy is being dealt with in Ireland via an firm of Irish solicitors. We have a solicitors in England dealing with the Irish solicitor end. We completed all the necessary documentation towards the backend of last year. Along our journey, we have been given numerous estimated completion dates for our case with the last being April 2009. Having recently spoken to the solicitors in england and being informed that this date is unlikely to be met, we are getting increasingly frustrated at the constant revision to the completion of our case.

What i would like to know is:

1) Is there a normal timescale in which these cases are likely to be completed.
2) What can i do if we feel that the solicitors have not performed as we expected.

thanks for any help.
 
FWIW, my mother's estate took 12 months to go through the process. A very frustrating process.
 
thanks for the reply baldyman. I know the frustration!! Can i ask you, was there any complications in your case or do you think that is probably 'par for the course'?
 
Depends what you mean by the process. Once all the documentation has been compiled and submitted to the probate office, it should take no longer than a few weeks if everything is in order. The main problem with probate is compiling the documentation in the first place - can be time consuming.
 
The solicitor said (all we could do was to trust him) that the various banks/building societies were very slow in coming back to them with the necessary documentation, as csirl said.
 
I found the banks all responded very quickly to my solicitor when my father died. Is it a particularly complicated estate OP? Property, bank accounts, insurance policies? Anything "unusual" in the estate? Getting letters of administration shouldn't take more than 2/3 months even for intestacy. Who is the administrator?
 
All the documentation has been in place since before Christmas 2008, this is why i ask the question of how long it takes. It seems to me that getting the letters of administration has taken a very long time. The case has nothing unusual about it and my fathers financial affairs were very basic. The administrator is the solicitors in England.

Thanks for all the reponse guys....
 
Lots of things can hold up the issue of a Grant
1. The Revenue Commissioners can take up to 8 weeks to process papers
2. If you are UK based the solicitors probably also had to submit documents to REvenue so that you could be issued with Irish PPS numbers.
3. If the firm of solicitors were dealing with a local district probate registry rather than the Seat Office then this can cause considerable delay as there are often huge backlogs in the District REgistries. It varies from place to place.

The following can hold up distribution:
1. obtaining income tax clearance
2. trying to sell property in the current climate
3. dealing with Share Registrars (tons of red tape)
4. Dealing with An Post - v slow
 
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