John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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3. To ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade when the foreign birth registration application service will start processing applications again. [47085/21]

John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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I ask the Minister to give details on the foreign birth registrations, the significant backlog of applications and when is it intended to start processing this very significant backlog again that has built up over the past year and a half or so?

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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I am glad that the Deputy has asked this question because it is good to put this issue on the record. My Department is responsible for citizenship by descent through the Foreign Births Register under the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956, as amended.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the processing time for foreign birth registrations, FBR, applications stood at 18 months due to an unprecedented surge in applications as a result of Brexit and the necessarily rigorous processing that applies to citizenship applications. At present, there are just over 31,000 applications in the foreign births registration system.

During the pandemic, passport service staff were reassigned to the HSE for essential contact tracing, to the Department of Social Protection for the processing of essential PUP payments and to support the Department of Health with quarantine issues. This resulted in a pause in overall FBR processing while Passport Office staff continued to provide an emergency service for foreign birth registration in cases of exceptional urgency.

More than 4,500 emergency FBR applications have been processed in 2021. The FBR service continues to consider urgent requests to expedite an application on a case-by-case basis, in cases such as expectant parents, or stateless persons.

In cases of exceptional urgency, FBR applicants may continue to contact the passport service directly by telephone or webchat on the Department’s website,www.dfa.ie

The passport service is actively planning to resume processing FBR applications as soon as possible. My Department is committed to allocating further resources to assist with the high volume of applications, with a focus on reducing turnaround times to pre-Covid-19 levels by the end of 2021. In the medium term, changes to the FBR process to increase efficiencies and improve the customer experience will be delivered under the next phase of my Department's passport reform programme.

In simple terms, Deputy, we have had to prioritise through the Covid-19 pandemic as to where are we focused our staff effort and, of course, we are dealing with emergency cases, and will continue to do that. We have processed nearly 5,000 of those this year but this has to be seen through the lens of the emergency that we been living through over the past 18 months.

John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the Minister and I appreciate that he had to prioritise where staff work, what is processed and what is not.

Unfortunately, there is a massive backlog of more than 31,000 applications still to be dealt with. It is concerning that the Minister has not been able to give a date for the resumption of the processing of those applications. Essentially, he has given the same response I have received from him to parliamentary questions I have tabled in recent months. It is essentially the same response I received from him in June and in July and there is still no date for the processing of these applications to resume.

I understand that staff had to be pulled to work in other areas, such as the processing of the PUP, but now that there are no longer significant numbers of people dependent on such payments, surely staff should be back working on the processing of these applications. The failure to process them is having serious repercussions for people who need these registrations completed as quickly as possible.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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The Deputy is correct to keep raising this issue. As of this week, we have opened the Passport Office for people to get appointments for emergency passports for the first time in many months. People can apply for appointments online now to get a rapid turnaround of a passport and so on. It is only in recent weeks that we have had full staffing levels back in the Passport Office. I have visited the office. The staff are doing incredible work, given the pressure they are under in processing emergency passports and passports through the general system. It is true that we now have our staff back from the other Departments in which they were located for all the right reasons in terms of helping other Departments. I expect that in the next few weeks we will have far more clarity on the timeline for dealing with FBRs. I will make sure the Deputy is informed as soon as those decisions are made.

John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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It is not satisfactory for the Minister to say that in several weeks he will have more clarity on a timeline. That is simply not acceptable. There is a massive backlog of 31,000 applications to be processed. Before the pandemic, there was, understandably, a turnaround time of between 12 and 18 months. The website of the Department has not been updated. It still states that is the processing time but people are now being told it will take more than two years.

I refer to the implications this has for people. I know of cases involving people trying to register who are stuck in war zones and are unable to register the birth of a child. That has significant implications relating to citizenship and accessing other critical identification such as passports. There are probably questions to be asked in respect of the legality of the failure to process these registrations.

We need a specific timeframe. The onus is on the Minister. He has responsibility for this matter and he owes the House-----

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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The onus is on the Deputy to keep within the time limits.

John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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-----and the 31,000 applicants a specific timeframe for when those applications will be processed and how the backlog will be dealt with.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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As I stated, when there are urgent cases that need to be addressed, we deal with them. There is a process to deal with them and we have dealt with 4,500 of them so far this year. If there are cases involving people in war zones or children who are stateless because they do not have a passport, there is a mechanism to deal with those cases. Let us be clear regarding what is available to people if there are urgent cases that need to be resolved. We will resolve such cases.

As regards the many non-urgent FBR applications that, of course, also need to be dealt with, we will deal with the 31,000 outstanding cases. The reality is that before the Brexit vote we were dealing with 5,000 to 6,000 applications per year. That increased dramatically to a high of 32,000 in 2019. There was a massive increase during Brexit and that has contributed to the issues during Covid. We will deal with the emergency cases and we will get FBRs delivered efficiently again. I will be able to update the Deputy on that in the next couple of weeks.