Mr. Joe Nugent:

The challenges we face in Ireland are not very different from those faced by passport agencies around the world. Passports have become incredibly valuable documents not just for the purposes of travel but, equally, for getting a bank account and other activities. For that reason, they clearly attract the attention of those who would like to use them for unlawful purposes. There are two broad aspects. The Secretary General has discussed the changes we have made to the security features of the book to make it more resistant to attack for forgery purposes. The second part is that people internationally are moving towards trying to obtain what are called fraudulently obtained genuine passports, in essence, assuming the identity of others. The systems we need to put in place, therefore, clearly have to keep track of and a focus on the more particular attacks we have seen of late. That means changes to the application processes we have in place, the technology systems and, from an internal point of view, looking at the way we monitor the processing of applications and assessing whether we are seeing potential threats from the point of view of how documents are handled and who is handling them. We have made a series of moves in making short-term, immediate changes; equally, we are looking at long-term changes to processes in the coming years.

In addition to the review referred to by the Secretary General, we also undertook a look-back process where we took applications received in 2013 and undertook a thorough examination of their processing to establish whether there were other matters that would be of concern to us, either specifically in respect of unusual applications or more generally around our broad approaches. The evaluation and audit unit is in the process of finalising a report on that process, but I am satisfied that the findings will show our processes are good. The reputation of the passport is well respected internationally. Irish people should realise that our document gets us into as many countries without a visa as most other countries. People from five or six countries may be able to access more countries than us. Our challenge is to make sure it stays that way and we make it easy for people to travel to countries without any administrative burden.