Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In fact, a whole litany of people, including politicians, solicitors, peace commissioners and others, can witness applications. Obviously, any of us would welcome anybody who needs that service into our offices. If we can be of help, we will try to oblige.

I have several criticisms of the current process. The Oireachtas helpline was established to assist Members in making passport queries on behalf of constituents. While we were initially restricted to five calls per day, I must say that the service is used very rarely by my office. We have not found it as efficient as we hoped it would be. I did a test on Monday to see how many times the telephone would ring out before somebody answered it. I will not say what the number was, although I might tell the Minister of State after this debate. The helpline is just not as efficient as it should be and it needs to be reviewed.

The natural reflex is for people to go into a Garda station to get their form stamped because that is what they always have done. However, there are difficulties with this, including in my constituency. A number of stations serving a large urban population, like Glanmire, are open only on a part-time basis. My understanding is that staff in the Passport Office will make three attempts to contact a garda on behalf of an applicant. If they fail to make contact, the application then has to be issued with a new link and a new consent form must be submitted. This has a knock-on effect of applications taking an additional three to four weeks to complete, which seems like a complete waste of time and resources. I ask that this apparent practice of a limit of three attempts to contact gardaí be reviewed. Staff should be cognisant of the part-time hours being operated by many Garda stations and the times when gardaí are available to take calls.

I would encourage people to renew their passports online, as the majority already do. I know of a number of people who have received their passport only a two or day after completing the online renewal. However, there is a certain percentage of the population who, no matter the public service in question, will always resort to a paper application. It is neither fair nor equitable that they should be restricted in obtaining a passport just because they submitted their application in one form rather than another. That is not right.

Many Deputies have said repeatedly in the House that the staff in our constituency offices often feel like they are working in the Passport Office, such is the level of interactions they are having with the service. It would be helpful if more of the personnel in the Passport Office were dedicated to manning the public telephone lines. Much of the time, people are coming back to us because they cannot get through to the office and we then make representations on their behalf via email. We need to look at the telephone and web chat services in the Passport Office. There are stories of people waiting many hours for assistance. Resources must be directed to address that.

See this speech in context