Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Deputy. If somebody needs to travel, he or she needs documentation. In my Department, specifically the section dealing with immigration, visas and those type of requests, there is a paper-based system. It is very much behind compared with other Departments, such as my previous Department, the Department of Foreign Affairs, which has an award-winning online system for passport applications. That is where we want to be. We want to move away from the paper-based system to an online system and we have allocated significant funding to try to get to that stage in the budget this year in the budget this year. That will be a significant help, even just with regard to the time that it takes to process all these applications. When there is a lot of paperwork, documents are sometimes unintentionally mislaid. This will, hopefully, take away some of those concerns. I reassure the Deputy and others that this is a priority for me and something my Department is actively working on.

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