Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I understand those arguments. Every city, town and county would like to have the convenience of being able to go to pick up emergency passports at short notice locally. My job, however, is to try to deliver 130,000, 150,000 or 160,000 passports a month and to do so in an efficient way whereby I can stand over the delivery times within which we say we will deliver and to get more than 90% of our passports delivered within those timelines. For the other 10%, 5%, 2% or 3%, whatever the figure is, where there are issues, we need to turn around those passports and to fix the issues as quickly as we possibly can.

We are doing the systems analysis to which Deputy Ó Cuív referred. He is right. This is about systems. If you are trying to deliver 6,000 passports a day to the public, you cannot have the system we used to have whereby you drop a passport in a box and a Deputy can take a dozen passports home to constituents. I can understand the attraction of that in the past, but we now have much higher numbers of applications and an expectation on the part of the public that they can apply from their homes - online, on an iPad or a computer at home - and get their passports in two or three working days in the case of a normal, straightforward renewal. For children, the turnaround time is within 25 working days now. If you speak to people in other countries about children's passport applications being turned around in 25 working days, most of them think that this is an extraordinary delivery time, given the security checks that are required and so on. It is not a perfect system but it is not a bad system either. We will have a lot more flexibility with the new software platform we will have in place this time next year, I hope, or certainly close to that. We will be testing this time next year, at least. I am told that the security considerations as to how the Passport Service has to function today will give us a lot more flexibilities to be able to work potentially through a network of social welfare offices, Intreo offices or post offices to provide more passport services to different parts of the country.

A higher percentage of the passport applications from the North are paper applications than in the South. We need to change that, and I need Members' help in getting the message out to applicants in Northern Ireland that when getting their Irish passports, they should apply online because it is a much more straightforward process. We are looking at whether we can put some kind of specific web chat function in place for applicants in Northern Ireland to be able to get information for urgent cases and so on. I have been asked whether or not I could open the Oireachtas line to MLAs in Northern Ireland. I think that would be a very difficult thing to do and that it would be unfair in some ways on Oireachtas Members if the lines were to be clogged up as a result of that. We are looking for solutions to improve communications and to get better information flow back and forth-----

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