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

There is an awful lot of information there but the one thing I am still not clear on, is the Minister of State said 13,661 applications came in last year. I think was the figure he gave. He did not tell me at this moment in time exactly how many applications the Department has live or on hand. That is key because some could still be there from the previous year, and some from last year's could be dealt with so what I am looking for is: how many applications are on hand?

The second issue most of us deal with when constituents who come in with queries is international protection. We ask questions of the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service, INIS, and to say that the answers are bland is to put it mildly. There is no information at all as to how the application is progressing and what the timescale that individuals can expect will take to deal with their application. The Minister of State gave me more information than we ever get from INIS. Are the applications dealt with chronologically, or how are they selected? The more information we get the less number of queries he will get and the more time they will have for actually processing applications.

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