Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To the latter question, as the Deputy rightly said, last May I jointly announced with my colleague, the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Peter Burke, that a project to adopt the single permit to work and live in Ireland would be developed. There is a two-stream process now. The outcome of this initiative will streamline this process for applicants coming to Ireland to work by combining three separate applications into one single procedure. This is a complex project that will take several years but it is continuing. We are working on it and we have established a group within the two Departments to do this. In the interim, we are putting in place as many measures as possible to try to speed up the process.

I am always happy to engage with any groups or to speak with groups where they feel there is a specific backlog or challenge. If we look at short-stay visas, however, the average processing time for first instance decisions is three and a half weeks. If there is an appeal, then the process does move to a waiting time of, on average, five months. I again ask people to ensure they have their information right. For long-stay visas, the first instance decision took six weeks. For all types of preclearance applications, the average processing time is three months and two weeks. They do vary, but for the most part we stick to those timelines that are set.

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