Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Department has made clear that a business case does not exist right now. We have had queries all morning with people wanting us to improve the service to make it faster and more efficient. There are choices in how we deploy staff. There has been a very significant push on innovation and in making the service more streamlined in respect of the birth certificate, for example. A total of 16,000 birth certificates have been delivered online as opposed to people having to get physical birth certificates in the past. This involves our collaboration with the General Register Office. That is all very positive and that is the direction of travel. If we can streamline this more and more, it will be more technology driven into the future. There has been an exponential rise in the use of technology but, to be fair to the service, it has improved very significantly mainly because of the focus on the online side of it. There are issues in respect of the paper applications still and we have to keep working to see if we can speed up that side of it, but we will keep the issue under review.

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