Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this subject. All of our offices are inundated with people who are desperate because of the disappointment of their children and their financial losses. When they contact their transport providers, be those airlines or however they are travelling, they are not refunded anything. People are losing thousands of euro because of chaos in the passport service. While some of this chaos could not be avoided, much of it could have been.

The Minister of State mentioned that there would be 900 staff in the months ahead, with clerical officers starting last Monday. He rightly stated that they would have to be trained, but who will do that? Will they be trained by the service's current staff? Training takes time. What is happening speaks to how plans were not in place to recruit the necessary people despite the fact that we saw the avalanche of requests coming down the line.

Many Garda stations across rural Ireland are operating on restricted hours and only on certain days of the week. The Passport Office gets back to them twice but cannot get an answer. This is another block in the system.

The situation with photographs is not acceptable. It was mentioned that 40% of forms were wrong. This has to speak to the fact that-----

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