Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I could be outdoing Senator Mullen in no time. These were all periods of suffering. It seems that the approach of the Department of Foreign Affairs when it comes to first-time applications is that you are going to have to wait for 40 days and 40 nights before you have any chance of your passport being processed. If people think about it, that is 40 working days. We are talking about three months. If a family is looking for a passport now for a newborn baby, they cannot realistically consider travelling any time before May if they are to hope to have the passport application processed. We are not seeing it done in the eight to 12 week period that has been talked about.

I spoke here about Councillor Rachael Batten from Dublin City Council, who posted a tweet with the photo of her baby that was sent to the Passport Office, alongside a photo of the baby now, and you can see how the child would not be recognisable on the passport some months later. This is of concern. It is not just last-minute applications. These are people who are thinking weeks in advance that they are going to go on holidays and they need to get their first-time passport, but it will only take a few weeks and then they discover that they are waiting months. They take out their frustration on some of us. You could say that they are passport-aggressive. It is clearly not something that we, as Deputies and Senators, should be doing. As colleagues have indicated, I find that it is now becoming one of the most common issues we are addressing.

Before raising potential solutions, I wish to refer to one other problem, which is the delay around foreign birth registrations. It is related to this question. During the entire Covid period, even when we were reopening marts and nightclubs, the foreign birth registration process in the Department was kept closed. There was already an 18 month delay in foreign birth registrations pre-Covid. Now, people are looking at a two-year plus delay in foreign birth registrations. In many cases, there were problems arising from the fact that people had sent in their passports as part of the process and then they had to try to retrieve them. In addressing the issue, I ask the Minister to look at the related question of foreign birth registrations and if we can speed up this process.

The drop-in passport emergency service has been a benefit in the past. I agree with Senator Ahearn's point that it does not really matter where the passports are processed, but there was always a benefit that people could go to the office in Dublin or Cork if there was an emergency. People do not mind waiting for hours if they can provide all the documentation and they know at the end that they are able to get their passport. I remember from personal experience that when my passport was stolen, I sat in the Passport Office just on the corner of Molesworth Street and it got sorted. That would be helpful in emergency cases.

In planning for the future, we need to look at how blockchain technology will allow us to develop a digital identifier. We are going to be able to travel with some sort of document that is blockchain enabled that will not necessarily need to be constantly renewed. We can control the release of our data. I hope that we are looking at that kind of technology in the future, which may solve a lot of the problems.

The internal design of the Irish passport is beautiful and it is something of which I am very proud. I commend those within the Department who are responsible for that creativity and use of Irish design.