John Curran (Dublin Mid West, Fianna Fail)

): I am taking this matter on behalf of the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

I am sorry for the distress, inconvenience and, in many cases, financial loss suffered by citizens as a result of industrial action at the Passport Office. I am disappointed that through this industrial action, the heretofore excellent reputation of the Passport Office has been damaged. I urge the public service unions to suspend their industrial action in the office, in particular to allow the deployment of temporary seasonal staff, and to lift their ban on overtime in order that serious inroads can be made into the backlog of nearly 50,000 applications. The passport service is a major operation, issuing up to 600,000 passports per annum or an average of 12,000 per week. At peak periods, this weekly output climbs to around 20,000. Any curtailment of output quickly leads to large backlogs.

Customers have been experiencing significant delays in processing passport applications. The Department of Foreign Affairs has been advising the public of the extent of these problems through media channels and via the Department's website. On 4 March, the problems being experienced reached a point where the passport service had to withdraw the guaranteed turnaround times for all passport applications submitted through An Post's passport express and its Northern Ireland equivalent.

On 16 March, accommodation and equipment in the Passport Office in Molesworth Street were badly damaged as a result of an overnight water leak from offices situated above the Passport Office. As a result, it was necessary to shut the Molesworth Street operation on that day and services were temporarily provided from some of the Department's other offices in the vicinity. Work on restoring the office is complete and over recent days the level of disruption has been kept to a minimum as a result of the contingency arrangements which were put in place.

The Department has contingency measures in place to minimise disruption to the passport service. These include the operation of two production facilities and a series of passport system redundancy and resilience measures. The primary passport production site is located in Balbriggan, where there are two production units, while a further production unit is based in Molesworth Street, Dublin. Unfortunately, the production unit based in Molesworth Street sustained serious damage as a result of the flooding, possibly beyond repair.

These production units are high volume systems and operate best with large throughput. This method of high quality centralised passport production is used in many other states as it is the most efficient and cost effective method of passport production. The production units are complex systems which allow us to produce secure and highly sophisticated passports. The introduction of the biometric or e-passport on 16 October 2006 has greatly enhanced the security features of the Irish passport. This technology added to the complexity of these production systems. They are sophisticated and expensive pieces of machinery which cannot be purchased off the shelf.

While the existing capacity of Balbriggan is sufficient to meet our immediate needs, the question of establishing additional passport offices and production facilities in various locations around the country is frequently raised. Persuasive cases can be made in favour of a number of locations. However, the main obstacle to the creation of additional passport offices is cost, and the current budgetary situation is obliging the Government to curtail rather than increase expenditure on public services. Nevertheless, the matter will continue to be kept under review.