Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Tá áthas orm cúpla focal a rá ar an ábhar seo. Years ago, I was selling fencing stakes and ran out of them. A purchaser who was looking for a lorryload of fencing stakes in a hurry rang me. I started to explain the problems I faced with supply and so on. He told me that was not his problem. He said he was not looking for excuses; he was looking for fencing stakes. The same thing could be said about the people looking for a passport. We can give all the statistics and reasons but people have to go abroad, for whatever reason, and if their passport does not come in time, they are at risk of losing their fares and bookings etc. The people do not care. They just want to get their passports in time.

I hate when Ireland is in second place. We should always strive to have the best public services in the world. International comparisons do not do anything for me. I want the best because I think we can do the best. It is about systems.

My view of the problem here, looking in from the outside, is that we need to analyse where are the commonest problems we are coming across. The first one is simple. It is a pity an instruction was not sent to the Garda six or eight months ago saying that gardaí in stations that are not open 24-7 should not be signing passport forms. An alternative would be to put a system in place whereby if a garda did sign a form, it would be logged in the 24-hour station in their area. The situation now is that a garda signs a form in good faith but the station cannot be contacted. I can absolutely verify that in most places in rural Ireland, the window is two hours per day. That problem could have been solved already and could be solved tomorrow. I hope something is being done in that regard. Let us get on and do it.

I know of cases that go back to February and early March for somebody who is travelling at the end of May. In most of those cases, there was supporting documentation involved with the application. It seems that when there is supporting documentation involved, the application is put aside until it is got to. If you make a planning application in any local authority, the first thing the local authority does with the documentation is to triage it to see if it is all there, and if it is not, the application fails. Any passport application that needs supporting documentation and is sent by post should be triaged to see if all the documentation is there at the beginning. If that had been done, a vast number of the inquiries I have received would have been taken out of the bundle and the issues would have been solved.

More staff working in an analytical system that is not the best never solves the problem. We know that 80% or 90% of applications are going through quickly. It is the outstanding 5%, 10% or whatever percentage that are being very held up that are causing the grief. They are the ones on which we need to focus. We need to find the reason for the delays, change the system and deal with the problem.

The tracking system is good but I understand two things about it. When the system states an application is processing and there is a progress bar included, that is an average thing and does not relate specifically to one's own passport application. Am I correct on that?

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