Your first months in Ireland: what you really have to do

Between deciding on Ireland and the first ordinary Monday there are a number of official steps, and most of them are smaller than they look from a distance. As a British citizen, or as a citizen of an EU or EEA state or Switzerland, you need no permission for the move itself; what remains are the practical registrations: the PPS number, your personal public service number and the key to almost everything, the driving licence, the car you bring, and for family members from outside Europe, registration with the immigration authorities.

The pages in this section describe each of these steps on its own, with procedure, deadlines and sources, and they are written deliberately without fuss: nothing is sold here, things get done. Where a step belongs to our services, the reference is there; where you can perfectly well take it yourself, that is said just as clearly.

If you take only one thing from this section, take the order: the PPS number first, because it sits inside almost every other procedure; then the bank account and the registrations that hang on it; then the car, whose relief on moving needs its own decision from Revenue; and the driving licence, which for a British licence holder means an exchange once you live here, while an EU or EEA licence simply carries on. Once you have understood this chain, you get through the first months in weeks. Alongside the offices runs the search for a place: where in the south-east you land and why you are better off there buying than renting is covered in their own sections.

And for the small circle of readers who look at Ireland not only as a place to live but because of European insolvency law: the network treats that one subject separately, apart from everything here.