Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As I stated, when there are urgent cases that need to be addressed, we deal with them. There is a process to deal with them and we have dealt with 4,500 of them so far this year. If there are cases involving people in war zones or children who are stateless because they do not have a passport, there is a mechanism to deal with those cases. Let us be clear regarding what is available to people if there are urgent cases that need to be resolved. We will resolve such cases.

As regards the many non-urgent FBR applications that, of course, also need to be dealt with, we will deal with the 31,000 outstanding cases. The reality is that before the Brexit vote we were dealing with 5,000 to 6,000 applications per year. That increased dramatically to a high of 32,000 in 2019. There was a massive increase during Brexit and that has contributed to the issues during Covid. We will deal with the emergency cases and we will get FBRs delivered efficiently again. I will be able to update the Deputy on that in the next couple of weeks.

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