Eric Byrne (Dublin South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

At the outset, I congratulate the office for doing an outstanding job.

I would rather see the empowerment of the citizens on how to get emergency passports than opening it up to politicians to have this exclusive right of access.

I am not good at mathematics but it strikes me, if my figures are correct, that if the Passport Service has issued 631,000 in the past year and these are of three, five or ten year duration, and if the Passport Service issued 631,000 the previous year, that comes to 1.263 million. If I included the previous year again, we would be up to nearly the number of the population. Surely everybody in Ireland does not possess a passport. For a country of 4.5 million, and, say, the few in Northern Ireland who would wish to carry an Irish passport as against a British passport, how could there be so many acquiring passports in one year? These seem remarkably large numbers.

My second question, and the route I want to go, may not be relevant to the Passport Service. It may be relevant to the Department of Justice and Equality, but Mr. Nugent might comment. We have been assaulted in verbal terms by politicians in Latvia who suggested that we were facilitating Latvian women in getting married here and obtaining Irish passports for in the main Pakistani partners, as against lovers, for the day. I understand from reading newspaper reports that there will be a revision of the methodology used for the recognition of marriages that are occurring, apparently, amongst other places, in embassies in Ireland, and the question of marriages of convenience for money or whatever.

On that issue, have the Latvians a case to be complaining about Ireland? Given the supremacy of the document and given that the Irish passport is the most valuable document any citizen can carry and the integrity of that person and the State is recognised in this piece of paper, can Mr. Nugent, as the head of the Passport Service, guarantee that there have been no further abuses or passports issued illegally to false claimants?

It seems that in the past our passport was easy to duplicate or obtain fraudulently in so far as the security services of Israel and the United States of America used forged Irish passports in carrying out assassinations on political opponents throughout the world. Can Mr. Nugent tell me now that our biometric system is almost incapable of being subject to forgery in so far as anything can be 100% foolproof?

This Government prides itself on having created 60,000 new citizens of the State in the past three years mainly comprising former immigrants or former refugees from 120 countries. Is Mr. Nugent happy that the systems are robust enough that those who are recognised for passport eligibility are fully vetted and is it the Garda National Immigration Bureau which ratifies the authenticity of a person of non-Irish nationality when he or she applies for a passport?