Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy McAuliffe.

When I was driving to the House this morning, I saw a queue outside the Passport Service office at 8.45 a.m. It was a long queue and it reminded me that today would be another day of passport issues to be dealt with by the team in my office, who are at their wits' end. I thank them for their work as well as that of the Passport Service. Every Deputy in the House will have a team who are plagued by having to try to navigate a system that works sometimes, which I acknowledge, but in many cases is very difficult.

It might sound ridiculous, but members of my team have lain awake at night worrying about individual passport cases. One lady in my constituency, for example, who has stage 4 cancer had to give birth at an early stage. There is only one opportunity for her to travel before getting treatment and we had to fight to get a passport to enable her child to accompany her. It is those types of very personal cases that keep my team awake at night worrying about their resolution but they also know they will be spending the majority of the next day redialling the Passport Service phone number, sometimes 100 times, waiting on hold before finally speaking to somebody, and while a couple of people at the office are very good, there are others who give the bare minimum, merely directing callers to the tracking website. All too quickly it is 4.30 p.m. and very little else can be done about other constituency queries. My team lie awake thinking about individual families, weddings, christenings, first holidays away after the pandemic, school trips and, for some people, what is a once-in-a-lifetime holiday opportunity that might end up being cancelled if we cannot get passports for them. Our staff are having to triage and make very difficult personal decisions about which applications are the most important to raise in light of our office limit of five queries per call, or 15 per week. Last week, we had used all of our queries by lunchtime on Tuesday.

The requests are not ridiculous. They do not relate to people applying for a first-time passport and expecting to receive it the following week. They are people coming with legitimate concerns and problems. I secured a child’s passport whose application had been in the system for a long time, and it arrived with the wrong date of birth printed on it. Of course, it was not the mother who got her child's date of birth wrong. In another case, an adult was making his second application since February. I have no idea what happened at the Passport Office but he was eventually advised to submit a second application. He received numerous calls from the office, one of them stating that he had misspelled his own name, another advising that his stated date of birth was wrong and still another advising that the application form had been ripped. He had not ripped it, nor had he got his name or date of birth wrong. This is a perfectly competent citizen. The final straw was that the instruction that he would need to submit a new application because he had used Tipp-Ex on the first one. Of course, he had not used Tipp-Ex on the application to correct something he had not got wrong in the first instance. These are the sorts of frustrations being experienced. The man has now sought reassurance in respect of the new timeline because he is about to sit his leaving certificate and just cannot spend the same length of time trying to organise a passport.

The tracker page often does not match the information the Passport Service has. A basic adult application seems to be taking more than one month and a half to be processed, although I acknowledge that is not in every case. I have been dealing with a child renewal application that was submitted on 4 May and is somehow going to take more than one month to be processed, with an issue date of 7 June, three days after the family is due to travel. The application has been assigned to a checker but, in our experience, that can mean anything from a quick resolution on the same day, which is wonderful, to no news for a week. That is far longer than the stated 15-day turnaround for a child renewal. In the case of one of two first-time passport applications I am dealing with, a request was made for new documentation after 30 days had passed. New documentation was submitted and the estimated issue date adjusted, which, as it stands, will mean the application will have been with the Passport Service for more than 60 days and the family will miss the travel date by three days. The second application was due on 21 April and more than a month later, it is still being processed. I was told two days ago it had been elevated to the priority list, which I communicated to my constituent, but when we called today, we were advised it will be added to the priority list. There has been no further update, and the action supposedly taken two days ago is now about to be undertaken.

I have delivered, as I am sure other Deputies have, the very bad news that a passport will not be available in time, only for the family to cancel their holiday and the passport to arrive the next day. Likewise, I have been told a passport is being printed and will be in the post the next day, only to be told it is at the same stage two weeks later. These are inconsistencies I cannot stand over. I cannot believe we are having this sort of process-level conversation at this level in the House for so long. These are the sorts of processing inconsistencies we have regarding the Passport Service. I recognise there are good people at the office doing good work and that they have been processing more passports than was previously the case, and I acknowledge the Government has hired more people, but these are basic State processes.

It is taking up too much time for everybody. It is creating too much stress for our constituents and citizens of this State who are entitled to their documents. Whatever needs to get sorted out just needs to get sorted out.

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