Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We are working our way through them. There was a record intake last time, around the middle of last year, with 8,200 applicants, so we laid out a timetable at the back end of last year to run up to March for all of those items and categories to be worked through. The Department did, and continues to, have a priority authorisation for applicants who need to get on with it quickly. They can contact the Department and it will process their application upfront to make sure they can get on with it. A few hundred applicants did that. Between now and March the Department will have gotten to all of the different category items and we expect to have everybody who has either have been approved, or had an issue raised with their file, being processed by the end of April.