Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I do not think Mr. Burgess said exactly that. Over 100,000 renewals have been processed so far this year. Over 90% of them have been processed within ten working days. As we all know, some renewals are processed within two or three working days. That is an excellent service. I will mention the biggest issue that people have. Traditionally, many people go through the passport express system. There have been 100,000 renewals through that system so far this year. The Passport Office's target is to deal with passport express applications within 21 days. The real problem is that approximately 50% of such applications are not dealt with within the target time. So far this year, approximately 27,000 such applications have taken up to six weeks and a further 22,000 have taken up to eight weeks, which is two months. The difficulty is that when people go through the passport express system, they think it will take three weeks or thereabouts. When six weeks have passed and they are due to travel the following week, but they have not yet received their passports, it can be very difficult to retrieve their applications from that channel of application to speed them up in another way. That is the difficulty people are having with passport express applications.

In essence, we are moving on. I would like to draw a comparison with an area of another Department. There was a time when people used to tax their cars by going to the local authority office. Then they started doing it by post, and now over 70% of people tax their cars online. Their applications are turned around within 48 hours and they get their tax discs back. The Passport Office needs to go there. It is going there.

Passport Express is the slow lane and the online service the fast lane. I acknowledge that first-time applicants cannot use the online service, but people need to be told that while the turnaround target is three weeks, this is not possible in 50% of cases. If many of those who had used the Passport Express service had known about the delays, they would have used the online service. The Department needs to encourage people to renew their passports online, where possible. It needs to be more proactive in that regard. Staff in post offices are probably aware that 50% of applications submitted via the Passport Express service will not be processed within the target period, but it is not their job to inform people of this. It is the responsibility of the Department to encourage people to use the online service, where possible. I accept that staff in the Passport Office are under tremendous pressure, but the Department needs to step up the move to the online service, where possible. Will Mr. Burgess comment briefly before we move on to the next item of business?