Mr. Joseph Nugent:

It does surprise me. Maybe it was something that occurred at a weekend when there was not availability of access to our systems. I do not know. Certainly it is a service that is provided - I would not say on a daily basis, but is a usual and normal service that is provided. Again, if that type of situation occurs, please let us know because something may have fallen between stools.

Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan raised some questions around the issue of lost passports. There is no easy answer to this. I understand it is an area that concerns many citizens who seek to travel at short notice. It is when they do not have their passports that particular challenges are created. To put the issue in context, we receive reports of 30,000 lost or stolen passports per year, the vast majority of which are lost. If I do a maths exercise - it may not be as good as Deputy Eric Byrne's - that equates to roughly 120 passports per day. This is a big issue for Ireland as a society. I thank Deputy Eric Byrne for his comments on how important and how critical the document is. We need to get the message out to Irish citizens that a passport is not like a bus ticket or a plane ticket. This is a document that has a value over and above what one might automatically say. Therefore, the care we give to passports is critically important. The fact that there are losses of that scale suggests that we have not quite got into that. We are looking to see if there are things we can do around that. Considerable numbers of passports are handed in to us after music festivals. Following music festivals in Deputy Bernard Durkan's constituency area, to which people travel from all over the country, we might get a box of passports returned to us on a given weekend. I am sure they are not from Kildare. They are from people from all over the country. It reflects the fact that travelling around with a document that is as bulky as a passport book is in itself not ideal.