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

I take the point. It is important to make a distinction between the facility that we have set up for Oireachtas Members, which is for emergency passports, and the general call centre in the Passport Office that can be contacted by the general public and by Members’ offices. This service did not exist at all until we set it up. Many people had been coming directly to me and my office to say that a family has to travel on Friday, but it does not look like the passport will have arrived until Monday or Tuesday. They asked us to intervene in an emergency way. We set up a special service on a temporary basis to deal with the fact that many emergency cases need addressing. I want to make sure everybody knows that every time an emergency passport is taken out of the system, it slows the system down for everybody else. The staff have to stop the machine and pull a passport out. Hundreds of other passports are slowed down every time that happens. We are trying to keep that facility to genuine emergencies, as much as possible. That is not to say that the other information, whether it is on the online portal or on the phone, is not still there and available, as it always would be. We are not trying to limit Oireachtas Members. We are trying to put an efficient system in place for emergency cases that can effectively bypass all other cases and get dealt with quickly.

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