Mr. Niall Burgess:

There are people who miss connections because they do not have a passport, and I acknowledge this. What I was saying was that nobody who is caught up with these delays, who submitted a passport with one expectation in terms of the processing time and then found their application was delayed, and who came to our attention and of whom we are aware, has missed a flight because we will always pull that passport application and try to process it for that person. If people discover they have lost their passport on the morning they are due to travel, they will miss their flights. This is happening quite a lot. We are making determined efforts to ensure nobody suffers by missing a connection because of the delays being experienced in the Passport Office.

Accurate communication is fundamental and information has to be put into people's hands. We took the view when we looked at our communications for this year that prevention is much better than cure. Therefore, we have put a lot of effort into communicating clearly ahead of time that if people are travelling this year they should look at their passports early. We have tried to give clear guidance, through Members of the Oireachtas and local media, on how to do this. We have kept our processing times accurate on the Department's website. Communication is fundamental and one of the issues at present is that people feel they cannot reach us, and this is a real problem and concern for us.

On the Brexit dimension, the increase arising through Brexit is not the major part of the increase in demand we are experiencing. We see most of the Brexit-related increase through Northern Ireland and the UK, and each of these two categories constitutes approximately 10% of the total number of applications coming into the Passport Office. So far this year, the numbers coming in from Northern Ireland are approximately comparable to last year. There is no significant spike there, although there is a slight increase. The increase in applications from the UK is approximately 20% compared with last year. That is a 20% increase this year on a 10% slice of the passports. The greater part of the increase has to do simply with the fact that more people are travelling and applying for passports. People who did not travel in previous years, for one or other reason, are applying now. This is the greater part of the increase.

We do projections every year, and we have done projections on a range of scenarios on the likely increase arising directly from Brexit. I will ask Ms Penollar to say a few words on this. By and large, our projections in the previous year have been in line with what we see each year. I do not think we have got the projection part of it wrong so far, and we are projecting a range for next year.