Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Members for their engagement on this important topic and for the opportunity to provide an update on the work of the Passport Office. I know this is an issue that many public representatives have spoken about and it is a service they engage with regularly. The passport service is facing its busiest year to date with an estimated 1.7 million passport applications expected this year. This is due to pent-up demand following Covid-19 public health restrictions over the past two years. I will put that figure of 1.7 million into context. The previous highest year was in 2019 when under 1 million applications were made but before that the figures show that there were between 400,000 and 600,000 or sometimes up to 700,000 applications per year. If anyone wants to see evidence of that this year, in January alone there were 137,452 passport applications made. The highest month on record before that was March 2019, when it reached about 115,000. The highest January on record before this year had just under 100,000 applications. We have had about 35,000 more passport applications this January than in the next highest previous January and in many other years it was half of what it was this January. If we had the number of applications we had this January for every month of this year, we would have 1.65 million passport applications.

I want to give Members a sense of the scale-up we are planning for in applications by outlining how we are planning for and responding to that task. This volume of passport applications represents a significant increase from the previous high numbers of applications. As I have said, the figure in 2019 was 935,000 passports issued. However, my Department has been proactively planning to ensure the necessary resources are in place to meet this extraordinary level of demand. Thanks to an additional €10 million allocation for the Passport Office service in budget 2022, my Department is making an unprecedented investment in the service in terms of additional staff and improvements to the passport processing and customer service systems. We are confident that the measures that have been implemented will help to reduce passport turnaround times in the course of 2022, particularly for first-time applications, which is what most Members have raised. This will assist the Passport Office in meeting the high demand forecast for this year. As I have said over 137,000 applications were received in January 2022, the highest ever number received in any month previously. These applications are all being processed in the usual way. There are approximately 66,000 complete applications with the passport service being processed, while 49,000 are waiting for applicants to submit the necessary documentation required.It is therefore clear that while the passport service is dealing with very high demand for passports, there is not a backlog as such; there are simply passports in the system. Some of them are waiting for documentation to come in to finalise the system and others are moving through the process.

My Department is actively working with the Public Appointments Service on a major recruitment drive that has been under way for several months. Since June of last year, 300 members of staff, at all grades, have been assigned to the passport service. Additional staff are being assigned on a weekly basis, with a goal of reaching staff numbers of 900 by the end of March. This represents a doubling of staff numbers over the course of the past nine months.

Along with many Government services, passport operations were disrupted over the past two years by the Covid-19 pandemic and restrictions linked to that. The passport service maintained operations throughout the pandemic, despite these disruptions. In order to protect the integrity of the Irish passport, the processing of passports requires physical attendance on-site. The Passport Office simply cannot work from home. This is not work that can be carried out from home, primarily for security reasons, where we must have a network within the Passport Office that is seen as safe and incorruptible.

In 2021, the passport service issued over 634,000 passports; processed over 7,000 foreign birth registration applications; and dealt with over 175,000 queries by phone and webchat from members of the public.

I would like to take this opportunity - as others have in the House this evening, which I appreciate - to recognise and thank the staff of the Passport Office, who continue to work on-site to deliver this essential service to our citizens. The head of that team is with us here this evening; Ms Siobhan Byrne is sitting behind me. She has one of the most challenging jobs in the Department of Foreign Affairs. She is constantly under pressure, seven days a week, to deliver passports on time.

With the recent ending of many Covd-19 public health restrictions, all passport service sites in Dublin and Cork are now operational at full capacity and have fully assumed all services that were in place pre-pandemic. Additionally, a new passport service site in Swords, County Dublin, opened in November, and can accommodate 140 staff. Many of our recently recruited staff members have been assigned to that location, where they are processing online applications.

I have heard calls for the passport service to work seven days a week. Through the provision of overtime to passport service staff, this was done for an extended period last year. From this week on, we will recommence overtime in a structured and targeted way, focusing primarily on fist-time applications, which has been the main concern outlined this evening.

Since September of last year, the passport service public office in Mount Street, Dublin 2, has provided appointments for urgent passport renewals. The Cork Passport Office has been open since October. More than 2,500 citizens who required an urgent requirement have been accommodated by the Passport Office sites in Cork and Dublin since they reopened. As Senator Boyhan said earlier, that system is there so that people do not have to go to public representatives to get passports at short notice. Instead, they can book an online appointment that can allow them to go in and get an extremely fast turnaround time.

This week, the passport service has increased the number of appointments at its public offices by 100%, providing an extra 170 appointments per week. Citizens availing of the urgent appointment service can renew their passport within one or four days, depending on the circumstances.

In addition, the passport service will continue to assist those who require passports for emergency travel by facilitating collection of passports at its public offices in Cork and Dublin. The Passport Office continually examines how to improve processing times and engagement with applications. Along with significantly increased staffing levels, the passport service is implementing a number of further measures that would positively impact the current turnaround times and improve customer service. Some of these reforms have come from suggestions from public representatives who have engaged in the process.

First, intensive training of new staff and upskilling of existing staff is under way to increase the resources that can process complex applications, and we get some very complex passport applications.

Second, the passport service is actively prioritising first-time applications and directing increased resources to processing these complex applications, with a view to reducing the current turnaround times.

Third, a new document management process is being put in process that allows for a much quicker turnaround time when an applicant is asked to submit additional documentation. Once these documents are received, they will be prioritised. Complete applications will be processed in three weeks. This will greatly reduce the waiting time for applicants who are missing documents in their initial application. A number of people have raised the issue with me that somebody submits, potentially, a paper or an online application, and a month later they get informed that there is something missing in the application that they have to resolve and send in. Then the assumption is that the clock starts over, which certainly was not the fault of the applicant who did not know there was something missing. We are trying to address that now to allow sort of a roll-over of the clock, if you like, that can allow those applications, particularly first-time applications, to be dealt with much quicker.

Fourth, public information media campaigns reminding citizens to check and renew their passports will continue during this busy year. In addition, the passport service is working on public education resources, including video tutorials to assist applicants in correctly completely their applications. This is a two-way process. For the system to work, the applicant needs to make a proper application, and we need an efficient system that can then get it done as quickly as we possibly can. We need to work on both sides of that equation, otherwise we will continue to have a frustrated public.

In the longer term, and in the context of the national development plan, my Department is making a significant investment in the future of passport services. A major reform currently under way is the replacement of the core technology underpinning the passport service. The current system was launched in 2004 and will be replaced by a more modern, integrated system. This complex project officially commenced in November 2021 and is currently at an early stage. Extensive detail, design, testing and phased implementation are to follow over the remainder of this year and much of 2023. This new system is intended to be substantially operational in the passport service by the end of next year, which is what I outlined to this House last time I was in speaking about this issue. The new system will ensure the passport service benefits from a resilient future-proof IT platform, capable of handling increased application volumes while maintaining the high standard of security that is the hallmark of the Irish passport.

I am aware that due to the recent lifting of many Covid restrictions, Irish people are considering travelling abroad for the first time in two years or more. More than 570,000 adults and children whose passports have expired since January 2019 have still not renewed those passports. There are also many young children and babies who have never held a passport and whose families are looking forward to a foreign holiday or a trip to see relatives overseas. Currently, 45% of adult online renewal applications are processed in one working day. I will repeat that because we are talking about 140,000 applications in January, and currently 45% - almost half - of adult online renewal applications are processed in one working day. Some 99% of online child renewal passports are issued within the advertised processing time of 15 working days.

First time passport applications take longer and there are a number of reasons for this that I wish to put on the record. It is important to check the applicant’s identity and their entitlement to Irish citizenship. The Irish passport was ranked at No. 5 in the world in the Henley Passport Index, as it provides our citizens with visa-free access to 187 countries around the world, which is virtually every country. This is something that we can be proud of. However, in order to maintain this ranking, it is necessary to conduct the thorough identity and citizenship checks currently undertaken by the passport service.

In the case of children, it is essential that the passport service verifies the consent of the child’s guardians before a passport can issue. This ensures that the passport service protects the rights of children and their guardians.It also ensures against child abduction, fraud and much else to which passport systems are vulnerable if one does not have the kind of checking systems we have in place. I have been in the Passport Office on numerous occasions. Trust me, the anti-fraud systems we have in our passport systems are very comprehensive from a technological point of view but are also very effective. There are plenty of examples of them preventing the issuing of fraudulent passports.

Due to the intensive analysis and extra measures undertaken by highly-trained and experienced staff, first-time applications take 40 working days to process, but we do want to get that time down and we will. The passport service continues to prioritise the reduction in processing times for first-time applications, in particular. The measures outlined here this evening, including the assignment of additional staff, training and upskilling of staff and improvements to the application process and customer communications will greatly assist with this.

I will give Senators a comparator in terms of how we are doing, versus our closest neighbour, which is an often-used comparator. Online simple adult renewals have a guidance of ten working days but often happen within 48 hours. Our guidance time is ten working days and in the UK it is 14 days. We are 50% faster. Child renewals have a guidance of 15 working days here and 15 working days in the UK, too, but it often happens quicker here. Those are actual times in the UK where they have live information.

There is a difference in first-time applications. The UK is at just over 20 days and we are at 40 days. We are now focusing our resources, training and systems on reducing that time. There is this idea that even with the significant volumes, there is something fundamentally wrong with the Irish passport system, when actually we compare very well internationally on turnaround times. Of course, there is always an expectation we can do it better and there will always be problem passports that take far too long.

We need to make sure we have consistency in the system and that, most important, people who make applications understand that if mistakes are made, there will be delays and that is predictable and they can get on the phone to somebody or on a web chat system to understand where the passport system stands. I take the point Senator Moynihan made earlier on individual cases but, in general, our system is efficient, compares very well internationally, has been put under extraordinary stress over the past six months, in particular, and has responded to that, by and large, very well.

For the problematic passports or those for which people realise they need faster turnaround times than is possible or recommended and political intervention is needed, we have set up an Oireachtas call line specifically for Oireachtas Members and their officers to try to help them with those individual cases.

I take the point on public representatives in Northern Ireland looking for access for Irish citizens to passport services there. I do not want to make a commitment on my feet on that but I will take a look at it.