Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

It is very evident that we have a passport crisis in this country. Lots of people are ringing hundreds of times to no avail to try to get their passport applications processed in time for their travel arrangements. They are facing looming departure dates which is making the whole process extremely stressful for them. It is also very clear from this debate, as Deputy Ó Snodaigh said earlier, that if one goes into any constituency office across the country, one will find a phone playing the wait music on the Oireachtas line to the Passport Office. This is obviously taking up a huge amount of the time of both Deputies and those who work for them.

I want to challenge the unspoken and largely accepted premise within which this debate is taking place. The Minister started by saying that people contacting Deputies to get information about their passport is a basic function of democracy. I could not disagree more; I really could not. Obviously I am happy to help anyone I can help. My office is happy to help anyone we can help but this is not a basic function of a democracy. It is a failure of a public service. This is part of the clientelist system whereby people get inadequate public services and then Deputies place themselves between the people who are entitled to public services and those providing them. This is not a favour we are doing as Deputies for people; they are entitled to these public services. They are entitled to have a passport. Deputies are placed between the public services to which people are entitled and the people and become a mechanism of communication. I do not have any power to grant people passports and nor do the people who work in my office. All we do is communicate back and forth with people. No offence to colleagues, but these people do not want to be calling us about passports. They are calling us because they cannot get information directly from the Passport Office. We have privileged access to a special line so people have to ring us to get information about their passports. The Government's way of dealing with it is to increase the number of staff who are going to deal with Deputies' queries about passports, thus increasing the number of queries we can make. That is fine in the context of the crisis we are in but this is not the answer. The answer is to have a service such that people can ring up the Passport Office, which is actually making the decisions about passports and processing them, and get the information themselves directly, without having to waste time going through us. That is what people would prefer to do. They do not want to have to speak to us.

We all want to help our constituents the best we can. Obviously, we will continue to do that for anyone who contacts us. We also spend a bunch of time doing this but the answer is to provide a proper public service in terms of the provision of passports in a proper timeframe. I will make some concrete suggestions in a minute but the fundamental issue is the resourcing of the service. People are working extremely hard but the office is understaffed and cannot get through the work in time. I fear that potholes have been replaced by passports as the thing that Deputies sort out but Deputies are not even getting the passports. They are just communicating the information that their constituents are still in the queue. It is not a very good use of public resources for us to pretend we have special access when the only thing we have access to is information. We should just give people that information directly. Staff should be mainly working on answering the calls of people who have applied for a passport rather than forcing those people to go through the extra hoop of contacting a Deputy, thus making Deputies seem important in this process when the reality is we do not have any power in this regard.

The biggest issue that people face is communication. People are under huge stress and anxiety trying to get their passports sorted before their travel dates and face enormous difficulty getting to talk to somebody either by phone or using the chat function. A basic point is that we need staffing levels increased to ensure they are adequate to respond to applicants in a reasonable time via phone or web chat.

Another thing that happens regularly is that constituents submit their applications but weeks later the Passport Office contacts them requesting further or corrected documentation. When they send in that revised or additional documentation, the clock restarts and they get a new, later estimated date for their application to be ready. They should not be put back to the end of the queue but should be left where they were in the queue and their documentation amended, rather than penalising them.

Another issue that has come up again and again is errors in applications not being identified in one fell swoop. Some errors are identified, the person fixes them, and then other errors are identified, all of which adds to the whole time.

There was a suggestion today that the passport postal service may be abolished entirely. I agree that we should have a preference for the online process, and that we should make sure to encourage people to do it online where they can. Obviously it is a quicker and more efficient system. In my opinion it is very clear that we must have the service available for those who cannot go online such as some people with disabilities and some older people. They cannot and should not be discriminated against because they cannot go online. We cannot just get rid of that service. The answer here is not to improve the Oireachtas urgent query service, but to-----

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