An empirical study on the development of e-notary and e-postille services in Ireland and specifically as it relates to tradecert.com

Abstract

In today’s world of globalization, technology and the internet it is difficult for any organisation or profession to remain in a ‘pen and paper’ based world when it comes to the running of their organisation. The role of the Notary Public is no different. The primary objective of this research is to investigate the development of e-notary and eapostille services in Ireland. At present documents that require a notary stamp and an apostille seal are manually stamped and verified. The process used to conduct this research was not limited to one source of methodology. The author felt that in order to give the best possible result a combination of methodologies would serve this research project appropriately. A combination of primary and secondary data was accumulated by various methods including, library database searches; books and journals; website searches; personal interviews; a questionnaire; and telephone interviews. The research discovered that Ireland is progressing, however slowly, in its introduction of e-Notary and e-Apostille services. To date nine documents have been electronically notarised by a number of Irish Notaries Public. The Department of Foreign Affairs is in the latter stages of introducing the e-Apostille program to the Irish public. At present the proposed introduction is with the DFA’s legal team who are ensuring that all of the legal implications of introducing such a service are studied and scrutinized to insure their compliance with Irish Constitutional Laws on data protection.