Mr. David Cooney:

I will ask my colleague, Mr. Nugent, to reply to the question about checks and arrangements, but I would like to inform the committee that immediately after the first potential fraud was established, I set up an external board, chaired by a former head of IT in the Civil Service, with a representative of the Garda, the Defence Forces and our own internal evaluation and audit unit, to look at our systems to ensure they were fit for purpose in dealing both with internal fraud and external attempts by foreign intelligence services to obtain Irish passports. It has become difficult because the booklet has become so sophisticated. It won an award recently. I do not know if members have seen our new attractive booklet. It is a handsome document and statement of identity and it won an award recently as the best European document. Those who wish to obtain passports are looking for fraudulently obtained genuine passports. The group I established has reported back with a number of proposals for actions we should take. These are actions we wish to take. We are rolling out an ambitious programme which involves upgrading our systems. When they were introduced ten years ago, they were state-of-the-art, but things have moved on. We are under way and Mr. Nugent will tell the committee a little more about what we are doing on that front.