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Procedure for HAPS for applicants living in Ireland

This document is a description of the procedure that we went through to adopt our son through HAPS (www.HAPS.org). A number of Irish families have used HAPS and our personal experience have been excellent.

We would be slightly different from most other couples in that Helene is Danish and Dave is Irish. This has meant that we have had to involve the Danish Embassy in London as well as the Irish. An Irish couple can, of course skip the Danish steps.

Notarisation:

All documents were Notarised by a Notary public (NP).

We used:

Elizabeth Bruton

Hillford House

Old Hill

Leixlip Co. Kildare

01-624 4567

and found her very helpful. She contacted other notary publics in Ireland to be sure that she followed the normal procedure for Guatemala which is:

All documents gets signed by a NP and their seal is applied. The two witness statement certificates (Special HAPS documents) were the only ones that were dated and the two  witnesses appeared in front of the NP to sign.

The NP does a cover-letter “to whom it may concern” with official letterhead that states the he/she is a Notary Public for life, puts the seal on, dates it and signs it.

Legalisation:

This is a 5 step process:

1. All documents that have been Notarised have to be signed off by the registrar of the  Supreme Court. The best thing is to call in advance and provide them with the name of the NP – if you do this then, when you go in, they can validate the documents while you wait (The Supreme Court, Four Courts, Dublin 01-888 6568). The way the Supreme Court validate each document is by attaching a cover sheet. Additionally they issue a letter saying that the NP is known to them and authorised.

2. You then have to go to the Department of Foreign Affairs –Again book time, hand the papers in and go for lunch and then pick them up. They stamp everything under their jurisdiction i.e. the Irish documents (Not the Danish –or whatever other nationality you might also have –they get stamped in their country of origin).

3. Next thing is the Irish/Danish Embassy in London (the Danish Documents to the Danish Embassy and to the Irish Embassy) –check opening times. What happens here is that they confirm that the Stamps from Ireland/Denmark are valid. Everything is done while you wait. Call in advance.

4. Then you go the Commonwealth Office and get everything stamped. What they do is confirm that the stamps from the Irish/Danish Embassy are correct. Very good web-page to tell you opening times and so on. It’s all done while you wait.

5. Last stop is the Guatemalan Embassy. Here you can not get everything done while you wait. It will take some days, call in advance, all documents go here.

You can use the Dublin chambers of Commerce for all 5 steps. However, we did step 1-2 ourselves.

The prices for the stamps are (per 2004):

Documents:

We got our doctor to fill in the same medical forms  that the health-board use –we just asked for a couple of extra copies and they were very accommodating.

Ideally all of this has to be done before you get the referral so as soon as you decide to go with HAPS you should start getting your papers together. If you do not have these together by the time of the referral you will get delayed as nothing can be filed before these are in order. We sent a copy of everything to HAPS before we went through the 5steps to double check that every thing was in order.

Once you have a referral you have to go through the same steps for the power of attorney that gives HAPS the power to act on your behalf in the adoption. For the power of attorney we did not use the Dublin chambers of Commerce and found it quite easy to do ourselves. We would probably not use them again if we had the choise.

We have copies of all documents if you have queries to any individual document please fell free to contact us on nhmg@eircom.net