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

Some 45% of our passport renewals for adults are done within 48 hours. There is a lot that is good about our passport system, despite the fact that we are producing about double the number of passports each month this year compared to what we were producing up until three or four years ago. A total of 4,000 to 5,000 passports a day are going out to people. There are individual cases where there are problems or difficulties with paperwork and we have glitches in the system, which happened this week and impacted on the phone lines. We are addressing that. It is not a perfect system, but there will be 900 people in passport offices in three different locations this summer to deal with volumes of passports that we have never seen before. The vast majority of passports will be very smooth in terms of delivery.

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