Ms Siobh?n Byrne:

Demand for appointments is extremely high at the moment. We are in the season of families going on holidays. That corresponds with the high demand for passports we are seeing this year because of the pent-up demand from 2020 and 2021. We have a process whereby we look at the appointments that are made on the system. We only facilitate appointments for renewal applications because first-time applications are complex and take much longer to process. We assess the appointments on a regular basis, daily or twice daily, to see if everybody who has an appointment qualifies to have one or if they already have another application in the system that is progressing well, so a passport may be already issued. We continually release those appointments back out to customers to rebook. That is why when you go into the system it might say there are no appointments but you could go in in an hour's time and appointments could be available on certain days. The demand is high. There is a limited number of applications we can receive through the public counter because they are resource-intensive. It is a paper process. It is not like the online process and is intensive to manage. It is very much a hands-on process.