Neale Richmond (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)

I will reply on two issues. Where an Irish passport is tampered with, it tends not to be a forged or made-up document. It tends to be a stolen passport which someone uses to try to assume the identity of the owner and by trying to say they look like the person in the photo. That is how good the Irish passport is. The Deputy referred to an incident from ten or 12 years ago. I can assure him that things are greatly different now. Hence, the number one status, which has been achieved by 500 amazing staff in Balbriggan who I was very lucky to visit with Deputy Grace Boland a couple of weeks ago.

As a personal observation as much as anything else, and the Deputy and I have been in this House for the same amount of time so I do not pretend to be an oracle on this, if a person is contacting their TD about any issue, it is generally the last-chance saloon. People get pretty desperate and sometimes there have been failings in the systems and sometimes the person is that anomaly. As I mentioned, only 17% of applications require Garda witnessing. So far, 440,000 applications have been processed, so 17% of 440,000 equates to 23,000, last week alone. There will always be a few where the Garda station cannot be contacted three times or the superintendent cannot be contacted and then, eventually, it has to go back. If that is to happen to a person who is one of those who does everything the Deputy and I would say to them not to do, such as book travel, particularly for a child, without a valid passport, the first place the person will turn to, if not the parish priest, is probably their local TD, in search of divine or political intervention. That is not to take away from the stress and the fact this does not absolve us from our responsibility to constantly improve the customer-facing role of the Passport Office. It is exceptional and possibly the best service in the State. Post Covid, we had a lot of debates about that and we do not have them anymore. I repeat that we will welcome any opportunity for An Garda Síochána to digitise its records. We maintain a good relationship with An Garda Síochána, and where we can work more closely together and where the Deputy can feed in this level of constructive criticism, I see no reason not to take it on board.

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