Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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I am glad to be able to address the Dáil on this important issue. I apologise for the absence of the Minister, Deputy Coveney. He is abroad on important State business.

The passport service has been the subject of much public interest in recent weeks, as always. A passport is a very important document. As a Member of the House, I am fully aware of the number of requests for assistance with passports received from constituents every single day. I also fully support the right of citizens to contact Deputies to make inquiries on their behalf when they have difficulties dealing with any State agency, including the passport service. It is a basic function of our democracy. The level of demand for passports is not unique to Ireland, and there are similar stories playing out in other jurisdictions, but we will concentrate on our own issues today.

There is a large demand for passports at present, given the removal of Covid-19 travel restrictions. Many people are getting away, whether for leisure or for work, for the first time in a number of years. The passport service is at present processing about 25,000 applications per week, so the number is high and there is a continuous stream of new applications every single day and a large dispatch of completed passports being sent out every single day. In 2015 the passport service issued 650,000 passports, all in response to paper applications. There was no online option at that point. By the end of June of this year we will have reached the same number of passports, so it could be said, and we are saying, that the number has doubled. In fact, it has more than doubled.

As with many Government services, Covid-19 presented extraordinary challenges to the passport service. I thank those officers in the passport service who were in work in the middle of the pandemic to deal with emergency applications which had to be granted at different times. In addition, many staff provided consular assistance overseas. Even during the level 5 restrictions, there were staff physically there to deal with those urgent situations. Since May 2021, staff have been working on site full-time. That presented its own difficulties in making sure the workplace was safe during periods of Covid challenges and restrictions.

Despite everything, 634,000 passports were issued last year. Understandably, there is pent-up demand. That is accepted. Based on our forecasting models, we initially thought and we said publicly that the passport service would receive 1.7 million applications this year, and we began to plan accordingly for that. We saw huge demand from September to December of last year, so that number has now been revised down to 1.4 million, that is, we expect 1.4 million applications. That is still an extremely high number of applications. It is the highest ever received in any year. The Department has therefore increased its resources to address the increased demand for passports. We have dramatically increased the number of staff assigned to the passport service. A major recruitment drive has been under way over recent months. There are 340 extra staff in the service since last June. Recently, the passport service completed its own recruitment competition for temporary clerical officers. I thank them for their work and for offering to work because, in an environment of high employment, it can be difficult to get people to fill such temporary roles. Many of the first officers recruited from that competition are from my constituency because the Passport Office has a facility in Balbriggan. The interviews have concluded and the first officers began work on Monday of this week. Officers recruited from the competition will continue to be assigned as we get them, to deal with applicants' queries on the customer service hub and to work on the applications. This means that there will now be 900 staff in the period ahead. That is double the number last year.

An important point to make, which I think every Deputy will accept, is that it is the statutory responsibility of the passport service to protect the integrity of the Irish passport. It is an important document. First, each application, and especially each new application, has to be checked very carefully. In addition, time and effort has to be given to bring on board new staff and to train them in this process.

I have received queries about particular passports where it transpired that the person simply was not entitled to one, or that a parent simply had not consented despite the fact that the form purported to show that he or she did. A number of cases every year, although I have no specific examples, are referred to An Garda Síochána in relation to that. The point I am trying to make is that a level of checking must go on, particularly in respect of first-time applications, to make sure passports are issued properly. We all accept that. We want it done as efficiently and as quickly as possible, but we accept that.

Measures have been taken to improve processing times. New video tutorials have been released to assist citizens in submitting the correct photos and consent forms. They are there to help, because there is certainly an issue in this regard. The passport service needs to continue to make this area as easy and user-friendly as possible. Like every Deputy in this House, I know there is a significant problem in this area. There has been intensive training of new staff and upskilling of existing staff to deal with complex applications and, particularly, with first-time applications.

In relation to the prioritisation of first-time applications, increased resources and overtime have been allocated to process these applications in order to reduce processing times. A new document management system was put in place in the passport service at the beginning of March. Its aim is to improve the processing speed in the passport service and the subsequent turnaround times for applicants. One particular feature of the new system improves the processing time for applicants who have been asked to submit additional documents. We want to see that going quicker. In my opinion, it is still not fast enough. To be fair to the passport service, it has taken measures to make that happen more quickly. That is certainly a bone of contention for citizens who are having difficulties with the service.

I am aware that issues arise when the passport service is unable to verify the consent of a Garda witness for a child’s consent form. This is a common issue. All Deputies will have encountered it in our constituency offices. I have been talking about it too. I am glad to have the director of the passport service here in the Chamber, although she is obviously not taking part in the debate. She is here to hear the feedback and to advise me.

In order to protect the integrity of the passport and the right of people to passports - let us not get away from the fact that it is the right of an Irish citizen to have a passport - it is important to make sure parental consent is verified for first-time applicants. Quite frankly, if one child abduction were to be carried out on a fake passport or on a passport that was obtained incorrectly, all of the queries in the world about delayed passports would be quickly forgotten. There is a balance to be struck between making sure this is done right, making sure no mistakes are made, making sure everyone who is entitled to a passport gets one as quickly as possible and making sure nobody who is not entitled to a passport gets one. I think Deputies appreciate that balance.I have been talking to Deputy Ó Cuív. I will not pre-empt what he will say, but I think he will make suggestions on how to make that even more efficient. I have already passed them on to the Passport Office.

What people should know about witnesses to passports is that there is a long list of people who can witness them. In most cases, you do not have to go to a Garda station. People should look at that as well. The passport service is actively engaging with An Garda Síochána to streamline this process. There were meetings last week and this week to try to reduce the difficulties that are being encountered in contacting some Garda stations that are not manned full time. I would ask people to bear that in mind when they are seeking witnesses.

Since 2016, there has been a reform programme to modernise the passport service. The stand-out achievement of this programme has been the introduction of the Passport Online service to customers. I want to pay tribute to a former legal adviser in the Department, Mr. James Kingston, who was on the co-ordinating committee for introducing and improving passport services. He died some weeks ago. I pay tribute to him for his work, particularly on passports. Passport Online has been introduced. If we could send one message from this Chamber, it would be that people should only apply for a passport online. They should not apply by paper. That is the most important message.

The Passport Online service is dealing with 90% of passport applications, including first-time applications. No application must be submitted on paper. I have told the passport service that many of my constituents have gotten the impression from websites, such as citizensinformation.ie, that first-time applications somehow have to be dealt with on paper. That is not true. Every single application may be done online, including an application for a child’s first-time passport. I strongly urge people to do that.

The pandemic has placed constraints and pressures on the service. The Passport Online service has definitely helped things. We would be a lot worse-off without it. In addition to Passport Online, the reform programme has introduced other changes. You can apply for a passport card as well as a passport book. This is an important document, particularly in the European Economic Area and the EU. An integrity unit has been established to strengthen our anti-fraud capacity. That helps to move along the regular 99.999% of applications that do not need to go anywhere near that unit. It helps to ensure that the Irish passport remains one of the strongest, most respected and most useful passports in the world.

The focus on digital services has allowed the passport service to collaborate across government. For example, passport applicants can now use utilise the government-wide MyGovID as an optional service when applying for a passport. The digital transformation of the passport service has continued at pace during a period of unprecedented turbulence in the external environment, including with Brexit, which has led to a huge shift in demand over the last number of years.

In the next three years, the Passport Office will continue its programme of reform, change and further enhancements. This will include the transformation of the technology that underpins the system and the back-up of systems that are an essential part of the efficiency of it, but will also help to prevent fraud and other attacks. The technological upgrades are also essential to stabilise and support the improvements for citizens at home and abroad and the roll-out of the Passport Online service has already been delivered.

The Passport Online service, which we are urging every single applicant to use, has brought about tangible changes for the citizen. The existing back-office processing system has remained in place for almost 20 years. We now need to implement a new application processing system. The project is at the early design phase and the new system will be substantially operational in the passport service in the next two years. The new system will complement the customer-facing advancements that have already been achieved through the Passport Online service. It will ensure that the passport service remains resilient and agile in response to future passport demand as our population continues to grow.

The passport reform programme will also encompass the redesign and modernisation of the passport book and card, as well as the replacement of existing passport personalisation machinery.

There are a number of steps that people must take. We have all fallen foul of these from time to time. People should check their passports before booking travel. Over the years, it has happened that I discovered problems very late. This is especially the case with kids who have not had a passport before. You need to apply online, full stop and no exceptions. The Passport Online service is the fastest and most efficient way to apply for a passport. It pains me to tell people not to go to a post office, but in this case they really do need to apply online.

For renewal applications, the Passport Online service is up to four times faster than a postal application. The process is very friendly and straightforward. I had a situation where a constituent of mine was travelling. He rang on a Sunday night and he was travelling later in the week. He could not get an emergency appointment online. I acknowledge that can be difficult too. I suggested to him that he should try to apply online on the basis that in my experience, there was a reasonable chance that the passport would come. It came. He got the passport later in the week, simply by using the ordinary online channels. That will not be the case for everybody, but it will be for many people. He did not need an emergency appointment or any intervention from anybody. He was able to do that.

Sometimes, part of our role as Deputies is to give the best possible advice. I am trying to do that here, so that it can be amplified by Deputies all around the country. We are trying to make the forms as user-friendly as possible. There are some people who make mistakes, although that is not to blame the citizen. That can be a problem from time to time. There is just no getting away from that. It is not all citizens. The level of mistakes is not as high as has been reported in the media.

John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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The figure reported is 40%, which I think is scandalous.

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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I am not saying that. However, there are some errors. There is no question about it that there are some. People should check the Department website.

It is also important to say that we have published estimated processing times. That processing time does not start when you start the application. The processing time for passport applications begins once the correct documents are sent into the Passport Office. It is important that people know that.

In relation to urgent queries, a person who needs to travel for urgent or emergency reasons can get an emergency appointment. There are 400 of them available every week.

There is no question that again presents difficulties. I would love if there were more such appointments, but that would clearly be very time-consuming and very staff-intensive. I think I am in correct in saying first-time applicants cannot avail of the emergency service, which is to be expected. It is difficult to tell people that because it is an inconvenience, but a first-time applicant has to go through the verification process, which is obviously difficult at the last minute. There is also a service for people who have to travel abroad in an emergency, such as urgent medical treatment or the death of a family member abroad. There is no question but that these applications will be expedited and the passport service will make every effort to prioritise passports for these citizens.

I am a big supporter of Members getting the information they require because they are asked by their constituents to find that information and to help them. While this is a very small minority of applications, it is inevitable that when Members get the same type of queries throughout the country, even if these are a sample or subsample of the applications, it is the canary in the coalmine. It shows us what the problems are. It is very important, when Deputies raise these issues, that they are taken very seriously. I take them very seriously because if those issues can be dealt with, it must lead to a more efficient service. We see the same issues being raised time and time again by Deputies and that should point us in the direction of reform. The Minister has increased the number of queries each Member can make to 20 per week.

Measures have been taken. I will be listening very carefully to what Deputies will say, as will the Minister, who has responsibility for the passport service but cannot be in the Chamber today. I have no doubt that the officials in the passport service will also be listening very carefully because everyone comes here with deep experience of how this service works. I ask people to check the validity of their passports, to apply online in plenty of time, and not to make a paper application. There is always a balance to be struck between protecting the integrity of the Irish passport and giving a passport to everyone who is entitled to one, and making sure no one who is not entitled to a passport gets one. It is a highly valuable document. I will listen very carefully to what Deputies will say.

John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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It is rarely, if ever, a cause for celebration for any Minister when Deputies from every corner of the land, including those in the Minister of State's party, talk in this House about particular topics or issues on which they are being hammered in their constituencies. It is safe to say that passports are among those issues. Although the Minister may choose to differ if he was here, the reality is that the issue of delays in the processing and issuing of passports has found itself in the midst of the national conversation on politics. That is never good news for any Minister.

The passport service was able to give the Minister an estimate of the number of passport applications it expected to receive this year. According to him, that estimate now stands at 1.4 million, with in excess of 190,000 passport applications still to be processed. I have raised the many problems and difficulties with the passport service with the Minister for well over a year and, contrary to what the Minister of State said, those concerns have not been listened to or acted upon. The Minister is more than aware of the scale, nature and detail of the problems passport applicants are experiencing. The Minister's decision to finally act has come about as a result of media and internal party pressure, among other things, and is nothing more than an attempt to deflect attention from his failure to address well-advertised challenges the Passport Office has been facing for a considerable period.

Unfortunately, the Minister is no stranger to failure during this Dáil term. We have witnessed a catalogue of failure and debacle associated with his brief over a sustained period in recent years. His decision to change the title of the Passport Express service to Post Passport is an attempt to more accurately capture the reality of the lack of efficiency offered by the previously titled Passport Express. I wonder whether he gave any thought to renaming it "Passport Pony Express". In fairness, it took Pony Express only ten days to get from the east to the west coast of the US. The Minister insists the service is working well and that targets are being met. I do not doubt the Minister needs to allow himself to believe that, although I doubt even Facebook would be able to come up an algorithm that would have the voracious dexterity necessary to frame the current experience of applying for a passport in Ireland in the type of terms required by the Minister to sell to an unbelieving public.

I have spoken to many people and received countless stories, as I sure the Minister of State has, of individuals who have been left frustrated and in a state of despair due to their experience of attempting to apply for a passport in this State. One individual, who contacted my office in a terrible state, attempted to contact the Passport Office more than 600 times by phone in the course of two days in the past week. On one day alone, he tried calling 378 times as he watched the clock tick down on a flight for a family holiday. Needless to say, he did not get a hold of anyone on the phone. Unfortunately, he and his family never made that holiday away. This is a reality for many that is resulting in considerable financial loss, not to mention the emotional upset of parents having to deal with crying children and the reality that due to the cost-of-living crisis, they might be looking at the last chance for a family holiday for a very long time. In some instances, they are missing out on the first opportunity to meet grandparents, grandchildren or other family members since lockdown.

A survey of applicants has found the average number of phone calls to the Passport Office before they receive an answer is 80. That is the average number of attempts. People simply cannot access accurate information on where their application process is at. They cannot get in contact by phone nor can they access staff through the webchat service. To understand what passport applicants are going through as the target passport issue date passes, the date of their flight approaches and they are faced with the question of whether to cancel requires a degree of empathy for ordinary people, which is something this Government simply lacks in abundance. Time and time again, we witness indifference and a lack of empathy from this Government for the plight of ordinary workers and families. It has to be said it is an absolute disgrace. Rather than meaningfully engage with the issue, and rather than undertake the process of searching for solutions, the Minister has sought to position blame on applicants, stating that up to 40% of forms are being incorrectly completed.

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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I did not say that.

John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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I said "the Minister"; I did not say "the Minister of State". This is a blatantly obvious attempt to deflect from the bigger problems with the forms and the online process. Even the Minister's Government colleague, the Tánaiste and Fine Gael leader, Deputy Varadkar, is prepared to concede that by pointing out it is obvious that if 40% of forms are being filled out incorrectly, the problem is with the forms and not the applicants. The reality is the whole process needs to be dragged right into the 21st century. Online processes are supposed to make people's lives easier and not drag them right into the pit of despair.

I will also make the point that I have previously met with staff from the Passport Office and have been very impressed with their dedication, professionalism and commitment to the service. I do not blame them because they are stretched and are working extremely hard to deal with a very difficult situation. I am aware that they worked right around the clock through lockdown to try to deal with the backlog of applications during that entire period. The reality is they have to endure a complete failure in leadership from the Minister.

The buck stops with him, yet he has again failed to provide the necessary leadership and direction to ensure the efficient delivery of a major and critical Government service.

The primary delays centre around first-time applicants and applications for children's passports, which often require the provision of additional documentation. These delays extend to the foreign births registration system, where a large number of people are left waiting years to have their applications processed.

The problems surrounding passport applications have been so well documented that it is difficult to believe it is only now that the Minister is ready to respond. Even the Office of the Ombudsman felt compelled to offer criticism of the delays being experienced by applicants, describing the situation as unacceptable and stating that it would continue to monitor matters.

The number of applications from overseas has been growing considerably since Brexit, something that should have been expected and planned for. For the first time ever, this year saw more applications in the North for Irish passports than British ones. What more evidence is needed for the argument to open a passport office in the North? This idea needs to be pursued actively.

We have once again witnessed the Minister's failure to respond to another development that has placed further strain on a system that, as has been clearly established, is dysfunctional. The time to act has passed. Families will be left in despair. We need more and swifter action to ensure that more families get passports as quickly as they deserve.

Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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I will take this opportunity to thank the Minister's office and those in the passport service whom we manage to get through to on occasion for their empathy and hard work in expediting some of the cases we have raised with them. We all deal with such cases. Similar to many jobs around the country, I guarantee the House that, if someone were to walk into any constituency office in the State, one of the phones there would be set to autodial the Passport Office, such is the level of chaos.

As my colleague mentioned, it should have been predicted that this would happen, albeit perhaps not that it would reach this extent. However, it has reached this extent because of delays upon delays. Previously, I came up with practical approaches and mentioned them, for example, a reminder to people via email that their passports were about to go out of date. This idea might not have dealt with the current chaos, given that some of it is related to Covid and people's passports going out of date, but when someone is booking a flight, there is no reminder that he or she should check his or her passport. That would be a simple change. The State has a responsibility. Passports do not come cheap. People can apply online now, so they provide their email addresses. In nine and a half years' time, a message could go to that email address. This might not catch everyone, but it would catch some.

There are cases of signatures given in Garda stations up and down the country not being recorded, which leads to chaos and the mother or father running around trying to get things in order. I have dealt with cases from abroad. For example, there are people in England who are willing to travel all the way back to Ireland to collect passports that are not coming. They applied in January and the wedding they are going to in France will be in June, but they were told in May that they did not supply enough documentation. This is crazy. There needs to be a quicker, nearly instantaneous assessment of the documentation when it arrives. An elderly man in my constituency applied for a renewal in February and booked a flight for a major operation in Spain, but he had still not received his passport in May. That is crazy.

I appeal to the Minister of State to put more resources into the service and to ensure that booking sites and the like carry reminders for people who are booking flights or holidays abroad.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I welcome the opportunity to speak on this subject. All of our offices are inundated with people who are desperate because of the disappointment of their children and their financial losses. When they contact their transport providers, be those airlines or however they are travelling, they are not refunded anything. People are losing thousands of euro because of chaos in the passport service. While some of this chaos could not be avoided, much of it could have been.

The Minister of State mentioned that there would be 900 staff in the months ahead, with clerical officers starting last Monday. He rightly stated that they would have to be trained, but who will do that? Will they be trained by the service's current staff? Training takes time. What is happening speaks to how plans were not in place to recruit the necessary people despite the fact that we saw the avalanche of requests coming down the line.

Many Garda stations across rural Ireland are operating on restricted hours and only on certain days of the week. The Passport Office gets back to them twice but cannot get an answer. This is another block in the system.

The situation with photographs is not acceptable. It was mentioned that 40% of forms were wrong. This has to speak to the fact that-----

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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I will clarify that.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I have dealt with many cases involving issues with photographs. In fact, my own passport was one. Are proper instructions being given? Are we communicating properly to the chemists and others who are appointed to take the photographs?

Many practical measures could be taken within the system to speed the process up, but there needs to be urgency and the staff who have been recruited need to be trained outside the Passport Office, as it were. The verification issue also needs to be addressed.

No one wants to infringe on the integrity of the passport application process, but right here and right now, people are losing thousands of euro that they do not have in the first place and cannot afford to lose. Many of them have not had holidays for years. There are children watching all of their friends going abroad on school tours, unable to join them. This is the last thing that people need - people who have saved, scrimped and done without to get abroad. We need to fix this problem. I hear what the Minister of State is saying and it is right to put the message out there that people should only apply online, but that message should have gone out much earlier and should have permeated every household.

Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour)
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I will start where Deputy Conway-Walsh concluded. If I am correct, 90% of applicants are applying online now, which is the right approach to take and is what we always encourage constituents to do, but it does not mean that there are no problems. There are problems with the online process, as we have all experienced, especially in recent months. I will go into that in more detail.

There is no way to describe this other than to call it an utter mess. Deputies are referencing experiences from our constituency offices and from interactions with those who elected us to be here. We are doing this to illustrate a wider point about the dysfunctionality of the system. Citizens across the country are entitled to expect better from a public service. I hope the Minister of State will agree that it is unlike me to be critical of the public service and the way in which some sectors of it are managed and respond. He has set out the challenges as well as the plans for investment in the passport service, but we cannot say with any confidence that the service is operating at its best. It pains me to say this as somebody who is a supporter of public service, public servants and the public service more generally. This criticism is not directed against any individual in the passport service. I know that its staff are under severe pressure. They have, by and large, been helpful. That is, when we can get through and reach the right person. One of the problems when a Deputy or constituent contacts the Passport Office is that we often get conflicting information from different members of staff. Consistency of messaging needs to be examined in terms of the requirements that people are being asked to fulfil.

I want to offer some examples. I am glad we are having a debate. It was the Labour Party leader, Deputy Bacik, who last week called for this debate because it is important we debate what is an issue of primary importance in terms of public policy and the service the State provides to citizens and taxpayers.

The Minister of State, Deputy Byrne, referenced issues in regard to the verification of parent or guardian consent forms, which is a common problem. The Minister of State is very familiar with the area I represent; he is from that area and he has represented a section of it in the past. We have had many problems, like Deputies in my own party and others, in regard to the verification process at part-time Garda stations. The Minister of State knows there is a part-time Garda station at the southern end of my constituency at Laytown, a station he is very familiar with. We know there is a very high density and a high number of young families in that area who will be applying for first-time passports for children. We know that in a situation where there is a part-time Garda station and gardaí are not there to verify information when the Passport Office rings to check, the phone call is transferred to Ashbourne but the garda in Ashbourne does not know the individual constituent and may never have heard of the other garda involved.

This goes to the heart of the problem. We have a Victorian system where the verification details, the details of the passport application, the parent's identity and so on are essentially held in a ledger. As a country that prides itself on being a world leader in terms of the development of tech and IT systems, our public services should be adopting a best-in-class system to ensure we move away from the paper and pen to an online verification system that is safe. We can do that. It is achievable and other elements of the public service can do this very well. We need to ensure the information is recorded properly and then submitted to the Passport Office as efficaciously as possible and in a way that guarantees the integrity of the system. I accept that verification and integrity are critical.

I got a response from the Minister, Deputy Coveney, and a response from the Minister, Deputy McEntee, in regard to a request for the development of a modernised system. I was told that it simply is not going to happen and they referred to the fact there is only a small number of cases where the passport service has difficulty contacting the Garda station in order to verify the garda’s signature. That has not been my experience. I accept that the passport service makes efforts to contact relevant members of the Garda but it is not always possible. It should not be beyond us, with the skills we have in this country, to be able to develop a system that can deal with that, a modernised system to move away from the Victorian system that we have at present. That would make a very big impact on the efficiency of the system.

There are situations where it seems the paperwork is just not checked when it arrives or when it is submitted online. We were dealing this morning with a case in south County Louth where, four to five weeks after the original application, there has been a request for additional information, although that request could have been made four or five weeks ago. Is it the case or, more to the point, is it not the case that there is a group of people in the Passport Office who are going through and scrutinising the information? It would make their job easier in the long run and make the system work much more efficiently if they could weed out those problems at the start. We have been told it takes eight weeks for first-time applications and sometimes the clock has to start ticking again, or at least the system is not moving as efficiently as it might because of the delay. The idea that people wait for five weeks and there is no word, and when they check where their application is in the process, they find there is a bit of outstanding information or the Passport Office is not satisfied with the information received and is not then able to process it. That is bizarre in this day and age.

There simply has to be a better way to deal with this. I look forward to the Minister of State's response and to some new proposals emerging from the Department of Foreign Affairs as to how we can make this process and system much more user-friendly.

Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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Like every Deputy’s office, my office has been inundated with calls and emails in regard to passports. As we know, there is a serious backlog in the passport application process but there are further problems that have not been addressed. The online application system is welcome and 90% of people are applying online. However, the system is indicating dates of arrival of people’s passports but the passports tend not to arrive for weeks after the date specified on the link. Many people have missed holidays as the date could be two weeks out. I tell people to check their dates and they believe they will have it the next week, but they then come back to me to say that while they were to have it on, say, 16 May, it has not come and they are going on holidays the following week. I understand that the dates are an estimated timeframe but it is a concern. Although I have not had many such cases, I have definitely had a few. The concern is that we allow people to get their hopes up that they will get the passport. They are disheartened because it has not arrived on time and I have to tell them it has not been processed or printed. That needs to be addressed.

People are finding it extremely difficult to make contact with the Passport Office due to busy phone lines. We have to be mindful of the staff. I am sure they are working extremely hard, answering phone calls and looking up information when people ring. However, when I ring, I sometimes get conflicting information about a passport and I can be told one thing today and another thing tomorrow. We have to be mindful of that.

The biggest issue for me is the requirement for further information. We speak about an eight-week timeframe after the information has gone in but further information can be requested after six weeks, although it might be something simple. I ask that, when somebody applies, all of the information is looked at within a few days or a certain timeframe, and if the information is not right on the application, further information can be requested. I am very mindful of this issue because I and my staff members can be on the phone trying to find out exactly what is happening.

We have to be mindful of GDPR. I recently had to ring the normal Oireachtas line. I told the lady dealing with the call that it was an emergency as it was for a student’s school trip. While the lady could not have been nicer, she said she was sorry but she could not give me the information under GDPR. I told her that I could answer any questions she might have because the student’s mother had given me all the details. While I understand we have to be mindful of GDPR, in particular with regard to children's passports, we are in a situation where many people are looking for a break or students are looking to go away.

I have been saying for months to the Minister, Deputy Coveney, that this was expected. I firmly believe this is not something that happened overnight and it has been going on for months. Every time the Minister is in the House on the issue of passports, I will come in. Whether I get a speaking slot or not, I will wait until it comes up and I will come in and say to the Minister that we have huge issues with passports. Again, I am not blaming the staff and I think they are doing the job to the best of their ability. However, there is a lack of staff and a lack of walk-in services. Can people go and walk in? No. I accept people can get an emergency passport and I have dealt with a few cases in regard to deaths or where people had to go for an operation. The system for emergency passports is working well. I compliment the staff because emergency passports are being dealt with very well.

I had a case two weeks ago where half of the family went on holidays and the other half could not because two of the kids did not have their passports. I felt so sorry for them.

I have had other cases where people thought they were going on holiday only to find, all of a sudden, that they could not do so because their passport would not be ready on time, which left them at the loss of the money paid for the holiday. At this point in time, people really need a break. Is there any way, even for the next few months, to find solutions that will sort out these issues? I do not expect the current delays will continue to arise on an ongoing basis, but we are coming out of a period, because of the Covid crisis, in which people could not go anywhere for two years. It was great that some of them holidayed in Ireland during the periods when restrictions were not in place. At this point, however, I am seeing people, including students, who are disappointed because they cannot go abroad.

The passports for the two students I mentioned in recent days are being printed today and will be picked up at 11 a.m. tomorrow morning. There are good stories and I do not want to be just harping on about the people who have not got their passports. It is very hard for those who think they will get their passport in time and who may end up losing money. We need to try to find an easier solution, not only for the families and children who are in difficulty but also for the staff of the Passport Office, who could not be nicer or more obliging when one deals with them on the telephone. They can only do the best they can within the system that is there. As I have said to the Minister, Deputy Coveney, the system is broken. We need to fix it or get a new one that works.

Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail)
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Less might be more on this occasion, so I will be brief enough. To put the issues in context, I have been looking at average passport processing times for our European counterparts. In the UK, for example, there are significant delays, with people looking at anywhere between ten and 12 weeks to receive their passport. The same is true for many other countries in western Europe. I was amused to read that people in Germany are complaining that the average waiting time has gone from 10.4 days to 18.1. Given how renowned the Germans are for efficiency, they are not best pleased with this. This is a problem that is happening right across the Continent. We need to be cognisant that there is a surge in applications.

Nevertheless, there are a number of aspects of the passport service that we can work on and improve. I acknowledge that there has been a major recruitment drive over the past few weeks. I understand the target is to get to 900 employees and that the competition is not yet completed. Will the Minister of State advise us as to where that competition is at and how likely it is that the remainder of those 900 jobs will be filled as quickly as possible?

I note his comment that gardaí are not the only people who can witness a passport application.

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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I will clarify that for the Deputy.

Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail)
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In fact, a whole litany of people, including politicians, solicitors, peace commissioners and others, can witness applications. Obviously, any of us would welcome anybody who needs that service into our offices. If we can be of help, we will try to oblige.

I have several criticisms of the current process. The Oireachtas helpline was established to assist Members in making passport queries on behalf of constituents. While we were initially restricted to five calls per day, I must say that the service is used very rarely by my office. We have not found it as efficient as we hoped it would be. I did a test on Monday to see how many times the telephone would ring out before somebody answered it. I will not say what the number was, although I might tell the Minister of State after this debate. The helpline is just not as efficient as it should be and it needs to be reviewed.

The natural reflex is for people to go into a Garda station to get their form stamped because that is what they always have done. However, there are difficulties with this, including in my constituency. A number of stations serving a large urban population, like Glanmire, are open only on a part-time basis. My understanding is that staff in the Passport Office will make three attempts to contact a garda on behalf of an applicant. If they fail to make contact, the application then has to be issued with a new link and a new consent form must be submitted. This has a knock-on effect of applications taking an additional three to four weeks to complete, which seems like a complete waste of time and resources. I ask that this apparent practice of a limit of three attempts to contact gardaí be reviewed. Staff should be cognisant of the part-time hours being operated by many Garda stations and the times when gardaí are available to take calls.

I would encourage people to renew their passports online, as the majority already do. I know of a number of people who have received their passport only a two or day after completing the online renewal. However, there is a certain percentage of the population who, no matter the public service in question, will always resort to a paper application. It is neither fair nor equitable that they should be restricted in obtaining a passport just because they submitted their application in one form rather than another. That is not right.

Many Deputies have said repeatedly in the House that the staff in our constituency offices often feel like they are working in the Passport Office, such is the level of interactions they are having with the service. It would be helpful if more of the personnel in the Passport Office were dedicated to manning the public telephone lines. Much of the time, people are coming back to us because they cannot get through to the office and we then make representations on their behalf via email. We need to look at the telephone and web chat services in the Passport Office. There are stories of people waiting many hours for assistance. Resources must be directed to address that.

Denise Mitchell (Dublin Bay North, Sinn Fein)
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I am sharing time with Deputy Ó Murchú. I have lost count of the number of people who have come to my constituency office looking for support in trying to obtain their passport within the timeframe they were given by the Passport Office. They are being left in limbo because the service seems to be at breaking point. The staff in the Passport Office are doing their best in very challenging circumstances, but we need to look at an overhaul of the service. A campaign may be needed to show people how easy it is to use the online system. In doing so, however, we must be mindful that there are people who are not computer literate. Additional supports may need to be put in place to assist them. The Minister of State said that the majority of delays relate to application forms not being filled in correctly. We need to simplify the form and make it easier for people to complete.

The majority of people who contact my office about passports are complaining that the passport tracker system is not reliable. They also tell me that it is next to impossible to get through to the webcam chat facility or the telephone service. People have told me they took a day off work and made hundreds of calls but still did not get through. This is causing a massive amount of stress. We must get real about what is happening. People are losing out on holidays, which is costing them a lot of money because they have already booked airline tickets and paid money to travel agents.

Could something equivalent to the national car test, NCT, system be introduced, whereby a reminder email would be sent to people telling them when their passports will expire? This might prevent the big rush that happens in summertime when large numbers are trying to access passports. In addition, the logbook system used by the Garda needs to be integrated with the Passport Office system. The systems that are in place do not seem to be communicating with each other. There is a job of work for the Minister of State and his officials to do to address these problems. I hope we can get them resolved as soon as possible and that we do not have any more people stressed out trying to get their passports.

Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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We have been in the position before of there being a problem with the issuing of passports. We were told on that occasion that the number of staff in the Passport Office would be increased, if not doubled. I accept that this work is being done at the moment, which is absolutely necessary. However, we need a very quick audit of how many staff will be needed to deliver the service we require at this point in time. That needs to be done straight away.

I am repeating what every other speaker has said in pointing out that my constituency office is inundated with complaints from people who cannot get through to the passport service on the telephone lines or via the web chat facility. They have given up on doing so and they are particularly perturbed that they cannot necessarily trust the tracker system. They come to us for help but we cannot always through to the Oireachtas helpline. I acknowledge there is pressure on that service. I requested that extra slots be afforded to us for dealing with constituents' passport applications and I am very glad the Minister allowed that. However, it means the helpline will be choked up to an ever greater degree. We must be able to deliver for our constituents in this regard.

One member of my staff on her day off set aside considerably more time than it should take to make sure she phoned the Passport Office, accepting the situation that people are finding themselves in. This is just not working in any shape or form.

We have also been told there will be a streamlining process particularly for first-time child passport applications. We all accept the necessity for due diligence. I do not need to repeat what has been said about guardian consent forms at Garda stations. The Minister of State spoke about the need for a new memorandum of understanding. I am very glad there is interaction involving the Minister and the Garda. We need to reach a solution on that.

We are getting various pieces of information. Sometimes we are told the Passport Office will ring twice and sometimes we are told it will ring three times. We need to get clarity on that. That comes directly from the Passport Office.

I do not know what age we are in that this is being entered into a book. Even in my constituency there have been issues with busy Garda stations. That is an issue I brought up specifically with the Garda itself. There needs to be some sort of electronic tracking of that with information sent in by email or by a bespoke system because what we have does not make any sense whatsoever.

In Dundalk in my constituency, we are absolutely inundated with Northern passport applications. We need a facility for Northern elected representatives because otherwise they are coming in through us. In the long term, we need a passport office in Belfast. We need solutions as quickly as possible. I apologise that I will not be here for the end of this debate, but I would appreciate it if the Minister of State were able to give me an answer to those matters.

Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I thank the Minister of State for joining us today. I am very conscious that in a debate lasting over two hours, parliamentarians across the Chamber will be standing up and effectively saying the same thing. While that is frustrating for us, I imagine it is more frustrating for the thousands of people who have been left frustrated by this issue. We all accept the Passport Office's consistent lack of communication and accessibility to the public affects thousands of people throughout the country and has been a continuing source of exasperation. This is no reflection on the Passport Office staff in place at the moment. I know they are as exasperated as we all are. They do a great job. We just want more of them.

Passport representations have become the number one reason for people to contact my office. Constituents are desperate as they are unable to reach the Passport Office themselves. They cannot get through on the phone, through web chat or email for weeks if not months. Some families who have finally saved up enough money for a long-awaited trip away end up not receiving their child's passport that had been applied for months in advance. I heard of one case where half the family is going on holiday and the other half is not able to go. That is devastating for the morale of the family, especially coming out of a pandemic where people had to stay at home for so long. These are real issues.

There are new parents who desperately want to introduce their babies to grandparents who live abroad. There are family weddings and important work trips. The list goes on. We are at the coalface of hearing these stories. I do not want to highlight a single case or a constituent issue. The issue with the Passport Office is widespread and indiscriminate. We are not just talking about holidays, but I am very conscious how important these are. We are talking about people not being able to change their visa or access social welfare payments because they cannot get a passport for their child. In one case a woman who was breastfeeding contacted our office because she needed to travel for work purposes and was told she could not receive her child's passport and was not able to travel. This case was considered not to be an emergency. It is very difficult to have to convey that message back to a person.

Constituents contact their Deputies when they cannot get a public service they have paid for and to which they should be entitled as citizens of the country or people who live here. Deputies' offices are now becoming an extension of the Passport Office. As other parliamentarians have done, I pay homage to the staff in my office who are dealing with these issues almost hourly.

The news this week that the number of staff assigned to the urgent Oireachtas passport line was increasing from seven to 11 and the number of representations a Deputy can make on passport queries was increasing should not be welcomed because it is an admittance of failure of the system. Shockingly, 10,194 passport queries were raised by Deputies through the dedicated Oireachtas line for urgent passport queries between January and April of this year. We have a job to do in this Parliament, which involves scrutinising legislation and shadowing Departments. That alone indicates the lack of communication from the Passport Office to the public. The Ombudsman, Ger Deering, stated poor communication and lack of availability of somebody in the Passport Office to speak to the public are at the heart of the complaints his office receives.

I received a reply to a parliamentary question that stated approximately half of all applications currently with the Passport Office were first-time applications for children, and of those, 48% were considered to be incomplete. That would indicate a problem at the source. Parents do not want to delay the child's application. It is not their fault the system does not function correctly, but the issue is not being acknowledged by the Passport Office as a whole or by the Department. I hope our debating the matter today brings some degree of acknowledgement and, more importantly, a solution to the issue.

Deputy Catherine Murphy received a reply to a parliamentary question in which the Minister stated that, regarding incomplete first-time passport applications, the Passport Office makes every effort to contact applicants but its experience is that many applicants take weeks and sometimes months to send in the necessary documents. People are fastidious with these documents. When somebody is making a passport application, they take great care to ensure every line is filled out in detail. In every representation my office made, this has proven not to be the case, and I doubt it is the case for most Deputies making passport representations on behalf of their constituents. My experience is applicants are trying multiple times a day every day for weeks if not months to make contact with the Passport Office. It is essential we stop blaming applicants and acknowledge there is a genuine fault in the Passport Office as a whole.

Given the level of discussion and scrutiny generated yesterday, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the lunacy that came from no particular individual but from the Government itself in announcing the name change of Passport Express to Post Passport, as if that is something to be welcomed. It suggests that because the system does not work, we have changed the name of it. It is a complete joke that the name of Passport Express is causing the bulk of complaints and upset. Over 90% of all passport applications, including first-time applications, are now being made through the passport online service. Let us not make out that all these issues are because people are using the postal option for their passport applications nor that it is a name that gives people an idea they should be able to receive a modicum of communication and timeliness from the Passport Office once they are submitting a paper-based application. Is the Minister, the Department or the Government also looking to drop the word "urgent" from the urgent passport appointments given that the turnaround time to issue a four-day urgent passport is more than ten days at this point and no same-day appointments are available?

A number of constituents have also been scolded by the Passport Office that they should not have booked or made any future plans until they had passports in their hands rather than trust the information they were given by the service itself. Passports have been applied for months in advance and were well past their estimated arrival date, an arrival date that is presented on an online tracking service with rarely accurate timeframes and well past the stated turnaround times. The total expenditure in the passport reform programme over five years from 2016 to the end of 2021 was €13.4 million. I am not sure if that money has been worth it to date. The Minister and the Department need to stop blaming the public for the issues with the service and show some self-reflection and leadership. They need to just get the problem sorted.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I also welcome today's discussion about the Passport Office. At the outset, I acknowledge the work undertaken by the staff at the Passport Office. Like every organisation, during the pandemic it adapted its practices. It kept an emergency service going throughout the pandemic. Some of the Passport Office staff supported colleagues in the Department of Social Protection. I am sure all Deputies in the House are grateful for their efforts.

With a relaxing of those Covid restrictions, more people need to get passports for the first time or renew existing passports. This, combined with issues relating to recruitment and staffing, has resulted in the backlogs and delays we are discussing today. We are now at a point where thousands of families are approaching summer travel dates and are very worried about having passports issued in time, particularly for children. To be fair, it is clear the passport online processing system for renewals is generally the best and most effective way. I welcome the Minister of State's statement on that today. We need to ensure that is communicated to the public.

The main issue arises where people are making first-time applications, especially for children. The processing time for children's passports is having a significant impact on families as holidays loom. The process of checking the information on those applications can take several weeks, which leads to parents being alerted to problems weeks after the application, which they assumed was okay, becoming a problem. This can then result in a further delay for those applicants and is causing significant distress for parents. This is compounded by the difficulties people are encountering trying to get through to the Passport Office to get further updates on their applications. I ask for the procedure to be reviewed early, perhaps involving early checking of that documentation to resolve any issues relating to pictures, consent forms or other issues that may arise, especially with children's applications.

The Passport Office needs more staff to clear these backlogs. I know the Minister prioritised this and staff are currently being recruited but we need to consider an immediate temporary redeployment of staff.

I ask the Minister of State to look at the online tracking system and the information it gives applicants. It needs to be reformed because I am sure it actually causes some of the queries to the Passport Office.

I also ask the Department to arrange a media campaign to raise awareness about the online service and to promote the urgent appointment service at Lower Mount Street. The one-day and four-day services are useful when people need a passport quickly for a non-emergency issue. I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Thomas Byrne, for being here today. I know he will take these suggestions back to the Minister, Deputy Coveney, the Department and the Passport Office, which is ultimately responsible.

Neale Richmond (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Minister of State for being with us. I ordinarily begin statements by noting my appreciation for the opportunity to contribute to such a debate but, to be honest, I have absolutely no interest in contributing to this debate. I am utterly exasperated with the situation with the Passport Office. I do not speak alone. I am sure every single Member of this House, the other House, the vast majority of representatives in Northern Ireland, the Minister, the Passport Office and many members of An Garda Síochána around the country are sick of dealing with a system that is broken. By the time the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been contacting our offices for months get in touch, they are utterly exasperated. They are understandably stressed, frustrated, upset and at their wits' end. They are coming as a last resort, oftentimes through a friend or colleague or an MLA in Belfast, to their local representative hoping desperately to secure a passport not for the stated emergency reasons but for very important personal reasons. Many people are seeking the sheer fulfilment of a basic right as an Irish citizen, that is, the right to one's passport and identity and the right to travel.

I welcome the comments and genuine good intentions from the Minister of State but good intentions simply are not enough at this stage. We are talking about additional resources and recruitment. Are those additional resources going to lead to actual change anytime soon? Will there be change this year? Rather than leaving people on the phone for 100 rings, will they only have to put up with 50 rings? That is still not great. Representatives are not necessarily facing those waiting times. Those waiting times are for people who are sitting up through the night often mistakenly pressing the refresh button on an online tracking scheme because they are desperate to get that passport. They do not want to turn around to their seven-year-old child and tell them they cannot go on the trip of a lifetime that was promised because the family could not get passports, despite the fact the forms were put in 24 weeks ago. Perhaps the family made an error but it was not identified until ten days before the flight. It is all adding to a system about which we must be honest.

A recruitment campaign sounds great but, as Deputy Devlin said, why can we not have a proper redeployment? The Department of Foreign Affairs has some of the best public and civil servants this State can possibly produce. They are scattered around the world and doing amazing work that some of us do not see and we hope we will never see. They are involved with consular assistance, political influence, economic development and much more. They are the best and the brightest. The best and the brightest need to be fully deployed to fix a system that is becoming absolutely chaotic. I do not say that only because we, as public representatives, are getting it in the neck every day. I say it because the system simply is not working. There is no comparable state around the world that is encountering these levels of difficulty. The excuse of the difficulties presented by the pandemic does not cut it. The other 27 EU member states, the UK and comparable countries around the world are not suffering the same problems we are. We talk about issues such as inflation and the cost of living and say it is a global phenomenon and outline its impacts. This is a problem that is acutely specific to Ireland. The good intentions are welcome. However, if we look back to couple of years ago, before the pandemic, there was efficiency in the online renewal system and the passport express service. Our passport service was working excellently.

I have no interest in coming back to the Chamber before or after the summer recess and making the same single transferable speech about the hundreds of people who are contacting my office when, ultimately, they expect and want delivery to have happened months ago. All of us in the House are compelled to work with the Government to ensure that is done as soon as is humanly possible or faster.

Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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Tá áthas orm cúpla focal a rá ar an ábhar seo. Years ago, I was selling fencing stakes and ran out of them. A purchaser who was looking for a lorryload of fencing stakes in a hurry rang me. I started to explain the problems I faced with supply and so on. He told me that was not his problem. He said he was not looking for excuses; he was looking for fencing stakes. The same thing could be said about the people looking for a passport. We can give all the statistics and reasons but people have to go abroad, for whatever reason, and if their passport does not come in time, they are at risk of losing their fares and bookings etc. The people do not care. They just want to get their passports in time.

I hate when Ireland is in second place. We should always strive to have the best public services in the world. International comparisons do not do anything for me. I want the best because I think we can do the best. It is about systems.

My view of the problem here, looking in from the outside, is that we need to analyse where are the commonest problems we are coming across. The first one is simple. It is a pity an instruction was not sent to the Garda six or eight months ago saying that gardaí in stations that are not open 24-7 should not be signing passport forms. An alternative would be to put a system in place whereby if a garda did sign a form, it would be logged in the 24-hour station in their area. The situation now is that a garda signs a form in good faith but the station cannot be contacted. I can absolutely verify that in most places in rural Ireland, the window is two hours per day. That problem could have been solved already and could be solved tomorrow. I hope something is being done in that regard. Let us get on and do it.

I know of cases that go back to February and early March for somebody who is travelling at the end of May. In most of those cases, there was supporting documentation involved with the application. It seems that when there is supporting documentation involved, the application is put aside until it is got to. If you make a planning application in any local authority, the first thing the local authority does with the documentation is to triage it to see if it is all there, and if it is not, the application fails. Any passport application that needs supporting documentation and is sent by post should be triaged to see if all the documentation is there at the beginning. If that had been done, a vast number of the inquiries I have received would have been taken out of the bundle and the issues would have been solved.

More staff working in an analytical system that is not the best never solves the problem. We know that 80% or 90% of applications are going through quickly. It is the outstanding 5%, 10% or whatever percentage that are being very held up that are causing the grief. They are the ones on which we need to focus. We need to find the reason for the delays, change the system and deal with the problem.

The tracking system is good but I understand two things about it. When the system states an application is processing and there is a progress bar included, that is an average thing and does not relate specifically to one's own passport application. Am I correct on that?

Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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My second point about the system is that when the application gets to printing stage, it is absolutely critical that the tracking system is kept up to date with news about when the passport will hit the post. If it is going to hit the post today, the applicant will have it tomorrow because the postal service is very good. That is when people are most dependent on the tracking system.

I thank the Minister of State. I am sure there are a lot of solutions available. We need to become solutions-based, analyse the problem and solve it.

Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein)
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Having listened to the debate, it is right to say that people are very frustrated. We are probably now known as lastchance.com. I have listened to the stories that have been shared in the course of the debate. I have a pain in my head because I have spent the past three quarters of an hour on the phone trying to sort out issues for one lady.

She called the Passport Office a total of 354 times but could not get through. Thankfully, I got through today and I have to say the staff in the Passport Office are excellent. They are courteous and helpful. They are absolutely amazing but the problem is a lack of resources to help people. We have all listened to people and their families who are stressed.

There is a need for public information on booking websites and so forth. Messages should flash up reminding people to check their passports. The same should apply to travel agencies. The Department should also run advertising campaigns on television because not everybody is computer literate.

We are pitting people against each other today. Reference has been made to the staff in the Passport Office and while Covid does provide some excuse, there should have been a way for the staff to continue working because a passport is a vital document.

Every single day, each and every Deputy in this House is getting bombarded with queries from people who are distressed and panicking. Reference has been also made to the tracking system. We all use it to check the status of our constituents' passports. Often an application is past the issuing date by up to five weeks and yet nothing has happened. Another issue is the postal system. Again, possibly due to Covid, the staff did not touch postal applications but people were not aware of that. People have come in to me in a panic and have made new appointments with the passport office at a cost of €150 to try to get their passports processed.

Whatever plan the Passport Office comes up with, I appeal to the Minister to provide the necessary resources. There are lots of people out there looking for jobs. Surely we can get people to come in, assess the problem, let everybody live in harmony and let everybody be happy and less stressed.

Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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We all wish we did not have to have this debate. I am sure the Minister wishes we were not having it. I imagine his constituency office is the same as mine and is inundated. A hold needs to be taken of the information people are getting. I will use an example to illustrate what I mean because this is what is making people so frustrated.

A first-time application went in originally on 21 January. There was back and forth in relation to the documentation, which is fair enough. On 1 April, a message came to say that the office had received the supporting documents and was verifying them. On 21 April another message was received saying that the application was being processed. I read that as meaning that the documents had been verified and had gone to the next stage. The applicant heard nothing, despite repeated attempts at contact - up to 100 times a day was not unusual. On 18 May, an email was received saying that the Passport Office could not contact the Garda station and the applicant would have to resubmit, even though the applicant had been told that the documentation had moved to the next stage. This is what is driving people mad. Their documentation was good enough originally but it has been in the system for so long that it has to be resubmitted. This is a passport application for a child who is due to travel on 4 June but the estimated issue date now is some time at the end of June. When I say every effort has been made, we could not name between us an effort that has not been made in this case. It is deeply frustrating to do everything right, to understand, as this applicant did, that the system would be under pressure and to do everything right and still to find oneself in a situation where one is unsure as to whether one will get the passport. At this stage, the applicant is starting to give up. There will be no refund on the holiday which means there will be no holiday. A holiday is important but it is not just holidays that are being affected, as the Minister knows. People are hoping to travel to see family, including kids who have not seen their grandparents because of Covid. These are really serious human cases.

A suggestion was made here a number of weeks ago by Deputy Denis Naughten that the Passport Office could use post offices as a clearing house or a first line for document checking. I ask the Minister to look at that, along with any other suggestions that have been made. It strikes me that the one from Deputy Naughten is a good one. I would also like to support my colleague's call for some form of advertising to be done by airlines, ferry companies and travel agents asking people if they have their passports before they make a booking.

Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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It is very evident that we have a passport crisis in this country. Lots of people are ringing hundreds of times to no avail to try to get their passport applications processed in time for their travel arrangements. They are facing looming departure dates which is making the whole process extremely stressful for them. It is also very clear from this debate, as Deputy Ó Snodaigh said earlier, that if one goes into any constituency office across the country, one will find a phone playing the wait music on the Oireachtas line to the Passport Office. This is obviously taking up a huge amount of the time of both Deputies and those who work for them.

I want to challenge the unspoken and largely accepted premise within which this debate is taking place. The Minister started by saying that people contacting Deputies to get information about their passport is a basic function of democracy. I could not disagree more; I really could not. Obviously I am happy to help anyone I can help. My office is happy to help anyone we can help but this is not a basic function of a democracy. It is a failure of a public service. This is part of the clientelist system whereby people get inadequate public services and then Deputies place themselves between the people who are entitled to public services and those providing them. This is not a favour we are doing as Deputies for people; they are entitled to these public services. They are entitled to have a passport. Deputies are placed between the public services to which people are entitled and the people and become a mechanism of communication. I do not have any power to grant people passports and nor do the people who work in my office. All we do is communicate back and forth with people. No offence to colleagues, but these people do not want to be calling us about passports. They are calling us because they cannot get information directly from the Passport Office. We have privileged access to a special line so people have to ring us to get information about their passports. The Government's way of dealing with it is to increase the number of staff who are going to deal with Deputies' queries about passports, thus increasing the number of queries we can make. That is fine in the context of the crisis we are in but this is not the answer. The answer is to have a service such that people can ring up the Passport Office, which is actually making the decisions about passports and processing them, and get the information themselves directly, without having to waste time going through us. That is what people would prefer to do. They do not want to have to speak to us.

We all want to help our constituents the best we can. Obviously, we will continue to do that for anyone who contacts us. We also spend a bunch of time doing this but the answer is to provide a proper public service in terms of the provision of passports in a proper timeframe. I will make some concrete suggestions in a minute but the fundamental issue is the resourcing of the service. People are working extremely hard but the office is understaffed and cannot get through the work in time. I fear that potholes have been replaced by passports as the thing that Deputies sort out but Deputies are not even getting the passports. They are just communicating the information that their constituents are still in the queue. It is not a very good use of public resources for us to pretend we have special access when the only thing we have access to is information. We should just give people that information directly. Staff should be mainly working on answering the calls of people who have applied for a passport rather than forcing those people to go through the extra hoop of contacting a Deputy, thus making Deputies seem important in this process when the reality is we do not have any power in this regard.

The biggest issue that people face is communication. People are under huge stress and anxiety trying to get their passports sorted before their travel dates and face enormous difficulty getting to talk to somebody either by phone or using the chat function. A basic point is that we need staffing levels increased to ensure they are adequate to respond to applicants in a reasonable time via phone or web chat.

Another thing that happens regularly is that constituents submit their applications but weeks later the Passport Office contacts them requesting further or corrected documentation. When they send in that revised or additional documentation, the clock restarts and they get a new, later estimated date for their application to be ready. They should not be put back to the end of the queue but should be left where they were in the queue and their documentation amended, rather than penalising them.

Another issue that has come up again and again is errors in applications not being identified in one fell swoop. Some errors are identified, the person fixes them, and then other errors are identified, all of which adds to the whole time.

There was a suggestion today that the passport postal service may be abolished entirely. I agree that we should have a preference for the online process, and that we should make sure to encourage people to do it online where they can. Obviously it is a quicker and more efficient system. In my opinion it is very clear that we must have the service available for those who cannot go online such as some people with disabilities and some older people. They cannot and should not be discriminated against because they cannot go online. We cannot just get rid of that service. The answer here is not to improve the Oireachtas urgent query service, but to-----

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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That is only a very small part of it.

Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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It is, however, a big feature of the discussion here. It is a basic function of democracy.

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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We can find ways around the problem and try to solve it. That is the point I am trying to make.

Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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The basic point is to improve the service so people can get the service they are entitled to.

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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I agree.

James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Byrne, for being here. At the outset, I acknowledge that we arrived at this situation for very clear reasons. There is a sharp increase in the number of people who want to renew their passports. In addition, there have been some international circumstances that have driven demand for Irish passports. It is important that solutions are brought forward in this debate.

It would be an idea for the Department of Foreign Affairs to give priority to existing passport applications by those people who currently hold Irish passports. It is worth recognising that 45% of passports issued are done within a one-day timeframe. This puts the whole debate into some degree of perspective. Many people have heard of the more difficult and complicated cases around the registration of new children in order to get their first passports, which obviously is quite complicated. There is also the aspect of applications from people based outside the Republic of Ireland. Although they may be entitled to passports, in many cases for legitimate and proper reasons, it is important to recognise from an international point of view - and particularly driven by Brexit - that there are many people in the United Kingdom who want to get swift access to an Irish passport under the existing rules. Perhaps this should be a lower priority.

I believe that priority should be given to people living in the Republic of Ireland, who are based here, for whom this is their place of residence and where they are paying their taxes. It is one particular point. I understand this may, to some degree, be controversial for those who are living abroad but the Passport Office is trying to deal with an extraordinarily large backlog and we need to be co-operative to some degree with the Passport Office. I acknowledge the work being done by the Department of Foreign Affairs. The Minister of State, Deputy Byrne, has been very helpful with some very serious cases down through the last months.

From my own perspective as a back bench Deputy in government, I recognise that Deputy Paul Murphy may have a different view when it comes to emergency situations but I do like to be able to assist and help in getting access to the system when there may be a bereavement or for somebody who may need to be given a passport swiftly for necessary reasons. This is an important part of parliamentary democracy. We are very fortunate to live in an open and free democracy in this State where people have quite open access, which is quite unprecedented access in western Europe, to their Members of Parliament who are the Members of the Dáil and the Seanad. Obviously, this also applies in accessing social services and other services the State provides. I believe this is an important function of the work we all undertake. Dealing with the issue in front of us is going to be frustrating.

One other area I want to identify is improving the links between registration offices around the processing of birth certificates. This has been quite problematic but, from our experience, it seems to be causing the most difficulty when it comes to the emergency line and making contact with the passport service. When a person is trying to get a first-time passport it is, unfortunately, remarkably difficult to get those situations sorted out. It will cause a lot of upset for many families travelling over the summer months for summer holidays. I would like to see some degree of focus on that. I am aware that not everything can be done but that is one particular area where further investigation and further resources would be very beneficial.

We do appreciate the work being done by the passport service. There is a habit in this House of people getting unnecessary criticism. There is a huge backlog. More than 5,000 passports are issued daily. That is nearly the population of Fermoy in the context of passports that are handed out daily. They all need to be scrutinised. It is a very precious document. There are significant rules and regulations around them being lost. We must also bear this in mind when we are having this discussion. It is not something that can just be put through a computer and done automatically. It does need background checks and there needs to be a level of security around them. As we have seen, internationally the Irish passport is an extremely valuable commodity. We must be very conscious of that also. These are just my own views on the issue. I hope that the passport service and the Department of Foreign Affairs will be able to get over the next couple of weeks and months, which it would appear will be quite difficult.

Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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Like other speakers, I am glad to have an opportunity to say a few words on this subject. It is a very sensitive subject for the people for a number of reasons. Many people and many families have not had a holiday in up to ten years because when they were ready to go the Covid lockdowns came about and they could not go anywhere. Families have changed and there are more people involved. Babies have been born and, in some cases, babies who were born one or two years before the pandemic have never been on holiday anywhere outside the country because of Covid and the difficulties we all had to comply with. There is no doubt that this has caused a huge problem.

There is now a huge backlog. More resources must be applied in a way that is strategic in order to remove the waiting list. We have become accustomed to waiting lists in this country. It is not just the Passport Office or the Department of Foreign Affairs: there are waiting lists for health services and for almost every service in the country at the present time. We make excuses all the time. The time has come when we must deal with the issue and not spend so much time dealing with the excuses. I am aware that the Minister and Minister of State are extremely busy. They have been busy as a result of Brexit and the Northern Ireland protocol, and around the intransigence on the part of other governments in other jurisdictions. That all has taken its time and taken its toll. We must recognise that this is the case and, at the same time, we need to compliment them for the work they are doing in those areas. It is a very tough task.

Notwithstanding all that, there is the issue of the people. The people need to expect a first-class service, simply because it is a sensitive time, simply because they have been locked down for so long, simply because they were frustrated for so long, and simply because they feel the urgent need to make a little trip, get out of the country, and relax with their families. They feel this in a personal way. They feel that it is attacking them in a personal way. It is not meant to be like that but that is the way it is. Whatever needs to be done in the redeployment of staff needs to be done as a matter of urgency, not in six months' time or in one year's time. We need to do it now.

The challenge now is how quickly we can deal with it. Can we do it now? Can we deal with it in a way that will at least give us the clear knowledge that the issue is in safe hands? I am not happy criticising Departments, their offices or the public services in general. We all rely on them for the delivery of services and we have to appreciate that. The fact is that the service is not sufficient to deal with the demands at the present time. It is as simple as that. We can talk around it. We can walk away from it and pretend it is not happening. We can become impatient with each other as a result of the difficulties created. We must do something about it. To my way of thinking the answer to it is simple. Whatever it is, it needs to be dealt with now. Let us deal with it now. Let us remove the waiting list. Let us give the people a little break on this one. They have not had too much over the last years for a whole variety of reasons, which were not in the control of the Government or anybody else.

We now need to deal with it. It comes back to the same spot. This is not a criticism of the Minister or the Passport Office or anything else. It is about the people who have been locked down for so long and have felt deprived. Kids will be going back to school again at the end of the summer. There is not much sense telling them in September that we have resolved the problem. We need to resolve it now to allow families to have a little bit of enjoyment and a break and an opportunity to be together in a relaxed fashion after the past two and a half years. I am conscious of the pressures on everybody. I am not being dismissive in anyway but the fact of the matter is that the issue is there. It will not go away and has to be dealt with.

Imelda Munster (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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As the Minister of State has heard over and over, the Passport Office is in chaos. The service is at breaking point. One of the most frustrating things is that we are now into peak summer holiday season. This has gone on for a year and the frustration is primarily about the fact that nothing was done up until this point. We are now here at the eleventh hour trying to put additional resources in place to cater for these numbers. All of this was foreseeable. There had been ample time up until now, the end of May, to do things. The waiting list for first-time passports is growing and is absolutely huge. One family were asked to provide a birth certificate for their child three times because the Passport Office claimed, wrongly, that they had sent photocopies. That is how frustrating it is for people.

Concerns have been raised with me that the equipment in the Passport Office is having trouble reading the watermarks on some official documents. I do not know whether that is accurate so maybe the Minister of State can clarify. I have been told by somebody who deals with the issuing of those official documents that is the case.

There are several other operational issues that could easily have been addressed some time back and which are compounding the delays. For example, when the office requests additional information and that information is given over, that applicant is treated as a brand new one and is put back at the end of the queue, despite how long it might have been since their original application. Surely that could be addressed immediately, given that it was not pre-empted-----

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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Three weeks.

Imelda Munster (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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This was prior to that. Another constituent of mine applied for a passport in early March and was due to travel on a date this month. That date came and went with no word from the Passport Office. When she eventually managed to make contact, it transpired there was a problem with her passport photo and she needed to provide a new one. That raises the question of whether the Passport Office only looks at the application on the set target date. That needs to be looked at. If it is only looking on that set target date, that is probably why so many people are not getting their passports before they fly. Again, these are simple things that could have been prevented. Resources could have been put in place to prevent this backlog.

In another case, the person applied on 9 December and was given a target date of 13 May. On 16 May they were told they needed new consent forms as the number eight on the date on the form was not legible. They were due to travel on 9 June. Despite the fact that the target date was 13 May, their first contact from the office was on 16 May, which was after the target date. They applied back in December. That is insane.

Communication is another problem, as we all know. People can spend hours and hours on the phone. I thought one constituent was grossly exaggerating when she told me she had tried to contact the Passport Office 162 times, to no avail. This is affecting families, and workers in particular. Many workers in this State are told when their set holiday dates are. One person might have to take their holidays in first two weeks of June and another in the first two weeks in July. They apply for their passport in ample time and miss their holiday because the passport never arrives. That family then has no holiday for the following year. They have been robbed of their two weeks away after being through Covid and all of that. They probably have been looking forward to it since last summer, thinking that this time next year they would be up and away. They are robbed of it because of a lack of resources, proper planning and not foreseeing the foreseeable. It is totally unfair.

The other issue I want to raise is the establishment of a branch of the Passport Office in the North. I cannot for the life of me understand why that has not happened or why there is a reluctance to provide one. There are more people applying for Irish passports in the Six Counties than British passports. We have been calling for this for years now. It is compounding the delays. Why not open an office up North and relieve the backlog here? It is a win-win.

Peter Fitzpatrick (Louth, Independent)
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What is happening with passport applications is unacceptable. There is bad communication, people are not answering the phone and applicants are sometimes waiting for hours with no reply. I rang the office myself last week. Someone on the phone says you are number five on the list, then number four and then all of a sudden you are number 40. It is crazy what is happening. People think this is just about people going on holidays but it is not. There many people who have medical emergencies, deaths abroad or family members who are sick and they just want to visit them. In fairness to them, they apply for the passport in plenty of time. They are told the passport will be ready on 4 May and they are going on 6 May. Then 4 May comes and there is still no sign of it. They are panicked and frustrated. Many people will not have sympathy for Deputies and Senators but we are the ones getting the brunt of this. For the past number of years every phone call I received was about housing, but at the moment, nearly every phone call to my constituency office is about passports. People are shouting and roaring. They are frustrated and are giving out. The problem is they apply in plenty of time but there is no communication from the Passport Office. Nobody is answering the phone and it is frustrating people. That is totally wrong.

Another serious problem is that when a child applies for a passport, especially a first-time passport, one of the parent's passports has to accompany the application. When there is no sign of the passport, one of the parents will ring up and be told there is a problem with the passport and the office needs A, B and C. The parents then have two options. They can cancel the passport for the child, get their passport back and reapply, or they can go ahead with the existing application. It can be very frustrating and it is not fair.

The number of people's holidays that have been cancelled is unreal. It is not one or two holidays. People think the passport is coming on a certain date, and when it does not come, they get on to the travel agency and pay an extra bit of money to get the dates changed. Then it does not come the second time. It is causing a serious amount of frustration. People just want to know the truth and what is actually happening. With first-time passports for children, the main problem seems to be with the child's photograph. People could be waiting up to six weeks before they know if the picture was accepted, and then if there is a problem, they may have to start again. It is causing real problems. The application is scanned when it comes in. I do not see why they do not check the documentation there as the first port of call and then, if there is a problem, let the people know. It is all to do with frustration and bad communication.

The Minister of State said earlier that 340 extra staff had been employed since last year. Thanks be to God for that because I would hate to be coming in here today if there were not an extra 340 staff there. Nobody is blaming the staff. It is the people at the top causing the problem. It is just bad organisation. I accept that about 500,000 passports have been issued so far so far this year, and I believe the Passport Office is doing an additional 5,000 passports a day. I know the staff are doing their best. The Minister, Deputy Coveney, spoke about online applications. He said it would take ten working days for a single adult, 15 days for a complex child renewal and 30 working days for a first-time application.

He went on to state that applications submitted by post will take eight weeks. That was a lovely letter that I received from the Minister and I thought it was great, but it is not reflected in the many phone calls I have been getting to my constituency office.

We knew two years ago that this would happen, given we always knew the pandemic would one day subside, but we did not plan for it and that is the problem. I appeal to the Minister of State and everyone in the Department to resolve this, whether that requires hiring more people or just sorting out the people at the top. Please get it right.

Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)
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Most of the workload coming in to most Deputies' offices in recent weeks has comprised queries about passports. I thank the staff of both the Passport Service and the Department of Foreign Affairs for trying to deal with the applications. The aspects that are amiss are at a management level. There needs to be a better communication structure to deal with applications, as virtually every Deputy has noted. When somebody calls the office, the phone should be answered within ten or 15 minutes. People should not have to ring multiple times. If we can get that right, it will help people because if they know they cannot get a passport in time, they can do something about that. The great anxiety and worry for people relates to not knowing what is happening. They have to rely on the tracker and will get an email, perhaps two days or even one day before the passport is due, stating there is a problem with their application, and that is what is creating the problems. That 500,000 passports have been issued this year demonstrates what has been put through the system, and 5,000 per day is no mean achievement. Nevertheless, we need better communication.

I come from the west of Ireland and represent Galway East and it always annoys me that we do not have a passport office in the west. There is a passport office in Dublin and in Cork, and to hell with the rest of the country. There is a huge population in the west, and it is high time it was recognised that we are citizens equal to everybody else. I ask the Minister of State to relay to the Department of Foreign Affairs that it is high time a passport office was set up in Galway in order that if we want to get an emergency passport, we will not have to travel to Dublin or Cork but can get it in Galway. Similarly, if somebody wanted to walk in with information or documents, he or she would have a place to put them and somebody to talk to. It is a simple ask. One Deputy stated they wanted one in the North. I think we should start in the Twenty-six Counties, serve the country properly first and put one in the west. It is important we do that.

I get a lot of queries from people intending to travel to the UK. This is an issue the Government might take up with Mr. O'Leary of Ryanair. There is a common travel area between the UK and Ireland. The only airline, as I understand it, that looks for a passport as a form of identification is Ryanair. Perhaps Mr. O'Leary should use some of the common sense he professes to have, remove that requirement and line up with every other airline, including Aer Lingus, all of which accept other forms of identification. That, in itself, would release at least some of the pressure for people.

There is, indeed, an onus on everybody to ensure his or her passport is in date, but there is an onus on the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Passport Service to put in place a serious campaign to ensure people will check their passport before they book a flight, except for emergencies. We have to get out the message that indicative processing times are indicative only, and that if something is wrong with the application or the documentation, that will delay it further. That message is not getting out. It is important we seek solutions. If the Ryanair issue is sorted out, many of the problems affecting people travelling to the UK and within the common travel area will have been solved. If we resolve the communications issue for people submitting applications and if we set up an office in Galway to serve the west, that will help get the communication right. Everybody working in the Passport Service has done Trojan work over recent years. We are going to get many more queries as Deputies, which we must foist back onto the Passport Service. That is doing nothing but leading to more people having to answer more questions.

I thank the Minister of State for hearing me out and hope he will take my suggestions into account.

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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I am sharing time with Deputy McAuliffe.

When I was driving to the House this morning, I saw a queue outside the Passport Service office at 8.45 a.m. It was a long queue and it reminded me that today would be another day of passport issues to be dealt with by the team in my office, who are at their wits' end. I thank them for their work as well as that of the Passport Service. Every Deputy in the House will have a team who are plagued by having to try to navigate a system that works sometimes, which I acknowledge, but in many cases is very difficult.

It might sound ridiculous, but members of my team have lain awake at night worrying about individual passport cases. One lady in my constituency, for example, who has stage 4 cancer had to give birth at an early stage. There is only one opportunity for her to travel before getting treatment and we had to fight to get a passport to enable her child to accompany her. It is those types of very personal cases that keep my team awake at night worrying about their resolution but they also know they will be spending the majority of the next day redialling the Passport Service phone number, sometimes 100 times, waiting on hold before finally speaking to somebody, and while a couple of people at the office are very good, there are others who give the bare minimum, merely directing callers to the tracking website. All too quickly it is 4.30 p.m. and very little else can be done about other constituency queries. My team lie awake thinking about individual families, weddings, christenings, first holidays away after the pandemic, school trips and, for some people, what is a once-in-a-lifetime holiday opportunity that might end up being cancelled if we cannot get passports for them. Our staff are having to triage and make very difficult personal decisions about which applications are the most important to raise in light of our office limit of five queries per call, or 15 per week. Last week, we had used all of our queries by lunchtime on Tuesday.

The requests are not ridiculous. They do not relate to people applying for a first-time passport and expecting to receive it the following week. They are people coming with legitimate concerns and problems. I secured a child’s passport whose application had been in the system for a long time, and it arrived with the wrong date of birth printed on it. Of course, it was not the mother who got her child's date of birth wrong. In another case, an adult was making his second application since February. I have no idea what happened at the Passport Office but he was eventually advised to submit a second application. He received numerous calls from the office, one of them stating that he had misspelled his own name, another advising that his stated date of birth was wrong and still another advising that the application form had been ripped. He had not ripped it, nor had he got his name or date of birth wrong. This is a perfectly competent citizen. The final straw was that the instruction that he would need to submit a new application because he had used Tipp-Ex on the first one. Of course, he had not used Tipp-Ex on the application to correct something he had not got wrong in the first instance. These are the sorts of frustrations being experienced. The man has now sought reassurance in respect of the new timeline because he is about to sit his leaving certificate and just cannot spend the same length of time trying to organise a passport.

The tracker page often does not match the information the Passport Service has. A basic adult application seems to be taking more than one month and a half to be processed, although I acknowledge that is not in every case. I have been dealing with a child renewal application that was submitted on 4 May and is somehow going to take more than one month to be processed, with an issue date of 7 June, three days after the family is due to travel. The application has been assigned to a checker but, in our experience, that can mean anything from a quick resolution on the same day, which is wonderful, to no news for a week. That is far longer than the stated 15-day turnaround for a child renewal. In the case of one of two first-time passport applications I am dealing with, a request was made for new documentation after 30 days had passed. New documentation was submitted and the estimated issue date adjusted, which, as it stands, will mean the application will have been with the Passport Service for more than 60 days and the family will miss the travel date by three days. The second application was due on 21 April and more than a month later, it is still being processed. I was told two days ago it had been elevated to the priority list, which I communicated to my constituent, but when we called today, we were advised it will be added to the priority list. There has been no further update, and the action supposedly taken two days ago is now about to be undertaken.

I have delivered, as I am sure other Deputies have, the very bad news that a passport will not be available in time, only for the family to cancel their holiday and the passport to arrive the next day. Likewise, I have been told a passport is being printed and will be in the post the next day, only to be told it is at the same stage two weeks later. These are inconsistencies I cannot stand over. I cannot believe we are having this sort of process-level conversation at this level in the House for so long. These are the sorts of processing inconsistencies we have regarding the Passport Service. I recognise there are good people at the office doing good work and that they have been processing more passports than was previously the case, and I acknowledge the Government has hired more people, but these are basic State processes.

It is taking up too much time for everybody. It is creating too much stress for our constituents and citizens of this State who are entitled to their documents. Whatever needs to get sorted out just needs to get sorted out.

Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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When a debate of this nature occurs in the House it is due to a failure of a State service to deliver the service people expect. Whether that is medical cards, access to services for people with disabilities or older people, or, in this case, passports, the issue is an important one. It is sometimes thought that access to a passport or travel is a frivolity or luxury and other issues are treated more seriously. We should not judge the reasons people want a passport. People are entitled to apply for a State service and to have it provided in a reasonable period of time. That we are having these statements demonstrates that the Department of Foreign Affairs has failed to do that. There could be very valid reasons for that failure but we must acknowledge it. I say that because statements were made again this week that suggested there was nothing to see here, there was no problem or backlog and that, actually, in 40% of cases, the problem lies with others and is not our problem. I know that is not exactly what was said but it what many people heard. Of course there is a problem in the Passport Office. That is why it has been given additional resources. Of course there are issues. That is why every single Member of this House is being contacted about this.

The second issue we need to tackle is the view that Teachtaí Dála like being involved in the passport process because it somehow allows them to curry favour with their constituents and it is some sort of electoral trick to make us seem more relevant. As one member of my parliamentary party said, he did not get elected to the democratic Chamber of this country to process passports on behalf of the Department of Foreign Affairs. I think every Member of this House will agree with me on that. We want and should try to be constructive. In the first instance, the Government should help the Department by providing additional resources. I am pleased the Minister of State has outlined that it will do so, and it is welcome. Second, Deputies have first-hand experience of this, having been contacted by people, and we want to pass on some of that experience in order that innovations and changes can be made.

The most egregious failure was the return of first-time registration passport applications that had exceeded the six-month waiting period. Late last year and early this year, some people's applications were not processed within six months, resulting in the application form being returned to them. It is unacceptable that someone has an application returned for no other reason than the ability of the Passport Office to issue his or her passport.

There is the matter of the issue date. We have heard much talk about renaming things when it comes to passports. We should rename the "issue date" the "first time checked" date because that is the date on which the application is checked for the first time. Of course there will be issues with passports but if we only check the application for the first time when we tell people we are going to issue the passport, we are not going to discover the problems with the application until it is too late. If someone is told the issue date is going to be 31 May, it is reasonable for that person to make travel plans for that date. The issue date we all get on the tracker is not the issue date but the first-time checking date. We should be honest with people about that.

Of course there will be issues with passport applications. Issues related to photographs are the most frustrating because the website will indicate a photograph has been accepted and it subsequently turns out it has not been accepted. It is difficult for applicants to find out what the problem is or to engage in any meaningful way with the Passport Office to identify the problems and try to get them solved.

One of the biggest frustrations is the contact with witnesses. Some work has been done with the Garda to try to improve this. Outside Ireland we allow other people to witness first-time passport applications. In the North, for example, many people use their local priest, school principal, school secretary and so on. We do not allow that in the Republic. Perhaps that is one way of resolving the backlog in the Passport Office. Gardaí have enough to do, as do Teachtaí Dála, without processing passports.

It is difficult for people to use the web chat facility. It does not really function, if I am honest. There is no meaningful interaction and it needs to be improved.

There is also an issue with the return of documents. When parents apply for a child's passport they are obviously travelling together because the child is clearly underage and not in a position to travel alone. However, the issue date and the return of document dates are different. We need to be clearer with people about that. It is a service failure not to point that out and very frustrating in some ways. I had such a case this week. A passport was kindly issued to a child on time and we were able to get it but the passports of the child's parents, who live in my constituency and applied through the Passport Office in Balbriggan, were sent to Cork for redistribution. The parents had to travel to Cork to get the passports so the family could travel together. It is very difficult to explain to members of the public how that is a sensible process. Perhaps it would be sensible and more efficient if people had ample time and the luxury of having a couple of days spare for it to be transported. However, when a passport is crucial and the child and parents are clearly going to need to travel together, we need to find a different way of doing it.

I return to the point about communications. If we get these communications right and we are able to communicate more clearly, people in stressful situations will be less stressed and anxious and will ring fewer Teachtaí Dála. Having six or seven Deputies call about one application must be so frustrating but it is happening for a reason. I urge the Minister of State to adopt some of the good ideas and innovations this House is bringing forward, not in a defensive way but to help improve the system.

Carol Nolan (Laois-Offaly, Independent)
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We have a crisis here. It is absolute chaos. Some 195,000 applicants are still waiting for their passports, as the Minister of State knows. In my constituency offices in Laois and Offaly the volume of correspondence coming in is on a par with that related to housing and health, which I thought I would never see. Housing and health, in that order, have always been the main issues coming into my office. I acknowledge that 300 additional staff have been taken on in the Passport Office since last June, bringing the total to 760. However, I am disappointed greater efforts were not made to take on more staff because we knew this would become the huge problem we now have. It is unfair on individuals and families and a source of great stress and disappointment. I can only imagine what the stress levels are like for staff in the Passport Office, which is totally unfair. This problem is no fault of the staff. It has to do with the whole organisation and the system as it operates. The system needs to be improved, brought up to standard and moved with the times.

A number of Deputies alluded to the need for more passport offices. Having passport offices in all the regions would be a logical solution. We need this type of State service in the midlands because we have been left behind many of the other regions. The fair thing to do would be to have more offices and ensure every region is represented. That would certainly alleviate the pressure on the staff trying to deal with huge numbers of applications and working with a system that is not fit for purpose.

The real disappointment is that this has been going on for over a year. There was ample time to do more and perhaps redeploy staff from other Departments, in addition to hiring 300 people. There was definitely scope and time for planning but, again, a failure to plan has led to this problem reaching this point.

This is one of the few times that every Deputy of every party is in agreement. That speaks volumes. Most of the time, Deputies are at odds on issues and have different opinions and perceptions of how bad things are but on this issue every Member from every party is saying there is a serious crisis. It is totally unacceptable that a family will be given an issue date and will then make plans, perhaps using savings, and book different activities for a holiday abroad only to discover that the passport has not arrived. That is very disappointing and totally unacceptable. Again, it is about the system in place and not the staff.

The other issue is that people should be given the communication in time, with a more efficient system. There is, and has to be, a better way of doing business. Certainly, the redeployment of staff is one way to try to help clear the backlog.

The Minister of State spoke about encouraging people to do online applications. I agree with him, but all the applications I have dealt with have been online applications. There is still a problem. It is not due to the hard copies going into the office, but a problem in the system. It is not all down to the applicants making mistakes with their forms either. There is a multitude going wrong, but I believe the core reason we are in the current position is a system that is not fit for purpose. The Government has to be more proactive in opening more State services around the country and not just concentrating in particular regions, as it always has done. It definitely has to be more proactive in that regard and, as I said, have a passport office in the midlands and offices in other regions to get through the backlog.

I hope that the communication will improve. I call on the Minister of State to take urgent action and to ensure that the communication with people improves. It is unfair to have working families saving money and ploughing their savings into a holiday only to lose that money, their deposits or their flights. We have to find a better way and we have to move forward. We also have to ensure that this does not happen again. We must learn from this and make sure to plan properly, not wait until things are failing and falling asunder as they are now. Again, there is no excuse for that. There was plenty of time for the Minister for Foreign Affairs to intervene and there were lots of options that could have been pursued.

Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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The next speakers are Deputies Joan Collins, McNamara and Pringle.

Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change)
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Deputy McNamara is not in the Chamber so I will divide the time with Deputy Pringle.

I listened to the Minister of State's update on the passport service and the unprecedented number of passport applications that have been received and processed by the Passport Office. I accept that to a point, but the fact that we are a year into this means that patience is beginning to get thin. As we have heard, many Deputies are representing large numbers of constituents who are in a panic as they wait for passports to be issued. I have dealt with a number of families who have had to cancel holidays. Some have insurance, but some do not and that has caused financial losses. Needless to say, there is a great deal of anger about that. These are families who have been given their holidays from their workplace on a certain date and they put in their applications well in advance, but they had to cancel their holidays. It is just not good enough.

It should not be up to Deputies to make these representations. There is a Passport Office and workers are getting paid to do the job. A huge number of passport applications are coming in so we should get more staff in to deal with them more quickly. A member of my staff said to me yesterday that there should be separate verification to check that all the verifications are up to date. We are just hitting brick walls with people waiting six months. I can give two examples that I am dealing with at present. The main issue appears to be first-time passports for children and adults. The other area where there is a problem with delays is in the General Register Office where, when the child is born, one has to wait for the birth certificate to come through. The holiday is booked and there are panic stations getting the stuff in. Then there are calls from the Passport Office for more information or about the need for something else. The idea of even temporarily redeploying staff for three months into the verification area is something that should be examined very quickly.

With regard to the hotline, there are days one cannot get through while on other days one can. A man rang me about it on Monday morning. I do not have time to say much more, but I have been dealing with people who applied in January and had an issue date in April but then they were informed that they had to provide more information. It is just ridiculous carry-on; it is just not good enough.

Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent)
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It is unfortunate when somebody does not turn up as it throws everybody's timing haywire.

I will take this opportunity to commend my staff in Donegal who have been dealing with a continuous stream of passport issues over the last few months and who have been struggling with an unresponsive passport service. It is nearly impossible to get through to the passport service through the normal channels and the Oireachtas line is rarely answered in our experience. Often days go by without being able to get through.

There is also a serious issue with inconsistency in the passport service. The information given on the criteria for escalating a passport varies considerably depending on who takes the call. Something has to be done. My staff are still calling on behalf of constituents waiting for passports since February. That is unacceptable. The system appears to be completely unequipped to deal with the demand. One wonders why this is the case. We knew this was going to happen so why did we not prepare for it? A passport lasts for ten years and there is a limited number of Irish people in Ireland so it is probably the one service for which it is possible to plan accurately. If there are 50 million people in the world entitled to a passport, that is 5 million per year and so many per day, so one knows exactly what one has to do. It should be possible to plan properly for this service and to respond in a timely manner so people can actually get the service.

I am also aware that, as Deputies, we only deal with the problem cases. If people do not have a problem, they do not come near us. However, the number of problem cases increases according to the volume of applications that are received, therefore one gets this response. These are issues that are very important to people at the time they are applying. It is something they only apply for once every ten years and it is something the system should be able to deal with. There is no doubt about that.

It is clear that the Government has not taken this issue seriously. There is talk about people being taken on to respond to it. The video released yesterday by Deputy Higgins could have been mistaken for a parody. Instead of fixing the problem with the postal service, the Government has instead changed the name of the service to reflect its refusal to fix it. Not only that, it then proceeded to celebrate this as if it is a fantastic achievement. It is no wonder @MallowNews is no longer running on Twitter; it is clear this Government is doing a good enough job of making a farce of itself. Are we going to change the names of all services and Departments to truly reflect their work? Perhaps we will have a "Department of housing crisis" next, rather than the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

It is time the Government took this seriously. Issues with the passport service have to be addressed. This has been going on for too long now. At one time, it was people who were not applying for their passports in time to get them processed. Now, the passport applications have been with the Passport Office for an awful long time, but nothing is happening with them. Something needs to happen, and it needs to happen quickly.

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Deputies for their contributions. The sentiments they have expressed are sentiments I know only too well. I apologise for the absence of the Minister, Deputy Coveney, but I am glad that the director of the passport service has been in the Chamber throughout the debate.

Many suggestions have been made by Deputies during this debate. There were some good suggestions and many of them have already been applied. I remind people that we want them to apply online at this time, not to go to the post office. The passport service has been engaging this week with the Department of Justice. Deputy Ó Cuív's suggestion is excellent, unfortunately. We do not say it with any joy or celebration but people will have to reconsider going to part-time Garda stations. Deputy Nash made the point that the station in Laytown in my constituency is a part-time Garda station. However, if people want to be absolutely sure, they will have to go to the full-time Garda stations. It is not a cause for celebration, and I am not saying it is, but at this particular time that will have to be done. There are other methods that have been suggested and that should be examined in terms of electronic records and the like. They all are things that should be happening.

Deputy Ó Snodaigh made a very useful point about a reminder service. That will be a part of the reform of the passport service and it will happen.

Deputy Conway-Walsh made quite a good point, which I will answer now. She welcomed the new staff, I think, but asked if the existing staff's time would be taken up training them. That is a valid point and it has been taken into consideration in respect of the number of staff it was felt was needed.

Deputy Pringle made the probably valid point that we should be able to plan for this, but it is also the case that there has been a massive increase in the number of applications this year compared with the number pre Covid. We are processing record numbers of passports. In the run-up to Covid, which was unpredictable, we had the Brexit-related increase. That has levelled off a bit, but I think the number going through at present is unprecedented.

As for the idea that has been out there that the public are being blamed for the 40% of applications at issue, I will be very clear. I am not blaming the public. We should not do so. I will clarify the 40% figure. It is not that 40% of applications have mistakes on them. Let us be clear about that. If that message went out, it should not have. Approximately half of the 40% relates to people who have applied and then just have not submitted the documents. There will be many people in that position. They may not be in a rush. They are included in that 40%. Those are not mistakes. A huge proportion of the 40% does not involve mistakes. There certainly are mistakes - there is no question about that - but they are not at that level. We may need to look at this issue when reviewing the forms just to see exactly how many mistakes there are.

The Tánaiste has suggested that people go online only for renewals but, effectively, we are already asking people to do that. Deputy Paul Murphy said that some people should be given the option of using paper. That option is there at present. The truth is that, no matter what our best intentions are, an online system, in principle, should be a lot faster than paper or the post because it is done instantaneously and the applicant does not need to wait for the post office to post the application. Again, we do not want to blow too many trumpets, but it should be noted that more than 40% of online adult renewals are done within two days. There are problems, and I acknowledge them and am not being defensive about them in any way, and I do not want to be here either, with all of us making cases for our constituents, but the online process has brought huge success. While people question the extent of the need for witnesses and the series of provisions in that regard, they are probably necessary because of the seriousness of the document. However, I cannot answer Deputy McAuliffe as to why a member of the Garda Síochána is required here while there are other categories allowed for applications done outside the Twenty-six Counties. It is a fact, however, that the more stringent the witnessing on the first application, the more efficient subsequent renewals can be done, so there is a method in the madness. We just want to get it done as efficiently as possible. Witnessing does allow all subsequent applications to be done much more quickly.

John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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Not if your passport is five years out.

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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I accept that, but that will not be the majority of cases. That will be a small number of cases.

A significant number of issues have been put forward in the debate. I have no doubt but that the passport service will take into account all those issues and all the really good suggestions that have been made.

I agree with Deputy Paul Murphy that we should not have to do this on behalf of our constituents. Sometimes I see people complain about Deputies raising issues, but it is absolutely essential that when issues or problems arise, people are able to communicate with their local Deputies, who can then not just help resolve the individual case but try to get changes to the whole system, which I think is what everybody has been trying to do here. I fully agree that we should not be some sort of extension of the Passport Office. That is not what we want. That situation did pertain in certain counties for many generations. Deputy Pringle's county was notorious for it. People there would almost go to their local Deputy's office before going to a passport office. We do not want to get to that stage. I have seen some representations come in where it is clear that people have applied for passports and then maybe rung Deputies almost immediately. There is no need to do that. The more Deputies in the constituency one rings, the more people have to answer the phones in the Passport Office. If people want to ring their Deputies, that is their entitlement, and they should do it and I encourage it, but the more people they ring and the more phone calls that are made, perhaps the less it helps the system in the background. We are trying to get a reasonable balance, all the while trying to improve the system.

As for staffing, recruitment has been going on for the past year. I think I am correct in saying that it is not always easy to get people in the current environment. The training has been required and it is happening. We cannot just land people straight off recruitment into the Passport Office. I know individuals who did temporary clerical officer work for years in Balbriggan. They are people who live locally to me. Many of them have just got full-time jobs because of the temporary jobs. I am really grateful to people who do that work.

As to what will happen with the Oireachtas line, it is currently limited to 20 calls a week. That is only a question of staffing. What is being worked on at present is that there will be an online hub where Deputies should be able to get information on behalf of constituents much more efficiently, but it will be done online. That will come in in the next few months. It will mean that Deputies will be able to do more than 20 queries but they will not necessarily be phone calls. That will make it easier for staff and make the system more efficient. The Minister is not directly responsible, and I am not trying to run away from this as I am part of this Government, but I know that the Minister, Deputy Coveney, will be listening carefully to what has been said here.

There were a lot of thanks for the staff of the Passport Office and how friendly and professional they are. I know that the director beside me will pass that on. We have heard this in a non-defensive way and in a way that seeks to give the best possible public services. I completely agree with Deputy Ó Cuív that we want to be number one, not second best, in everything. There are comparable jurisdictions. Other countries are having a problem. We are not part of the Shengen area, so if we want to go on our holidays, we by and large have to have a passport if we are leaving the island.

Deputy Canney raised an important point that I will undertake to raise with Ryanair, although I believe that conversation has been had before. We have all told people that if they changed to Aer Lingus, they would be able to go to Britain at least because Aer Lingus will not require a passport for that because of the common travel area rules. A passport should not be required in the common travel area. That is why it is there.

I thank Members. I have no doubt but that the foreign affairs committee or whoever else will pursue this. I certainly will within the Department, and I will give a full report to the Minister, Deputy Coveney, of what was said today in order that he can bring this forward for further action at Government level.