Administrations do not always finish. A personal representative dies with land still unassented; an estate proved in the nineteen-seventies turns out, when a sale is attempted, never to have been completed; a foreign estate needs Irish authority over assets its home grant cannot reach. The law's answer is the follow-on grant, and the commonest species is the grant de bonis non: authority over the goods not administered, issued to continue what an earlier grant left unfinished.
When the office falls vacant
Whether a fresh grant is needed depends on how the previous one ended. Where a sole or last surviving executor who had proved a will dies leaving their own will proved by an executor, the chain of executorship can carry authority onward: that executor becomes executor of the earlier estate too, and no new grant is required. Where the chain breaks, an administrator dies, an executor dies intestate or their will is never proved, the earlier estate stands without a representative, and a grant de bonis non must issue to the person now entitled, established by tracing entitlement through the intervening deaths.
The archaeology behind farm titles
In this practice the de bonis non application is above all a conveyancing rescue: a folio still registered to a grandparent, the land farmed ever since by descendants who assumed possession was ownership, and a sale or transfer now stalled until the old administration is completed. The work is genealogical and documentary, death certificates and grants and wills across generations, establishing who is now entitled to extract the grant and what remains unadministered. It is slow the first time a family confronts it and slower the longer it was deferred, which is the standing argument for completing assents in every current administration.
The cross-border second grant
The other regular customer is the foreign estate with Irish assets: a grant already issued in the country of domicile, and a separate Irish grant, grounded on certified copies of the foreign will and grant, needed before the Irish farm, site or accounts can move, since foreign grants are not resealed here. These applications are procedurally particular, the proofs required for foreign-domiciled estates differ from domestic ones, but they are routine for a practice that handles them, and they run comfortably by correspondence alongside the foreign administration.
This article is general information, not legal advice. For the full practice area, see Non-Resident and Cross-Border Estates, or contact the practice to discuss a matter in confidence.