Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I certainly will. I will bring them back to the Minister, Deputy Coveney, and the Minister of State, Deputy Colm Brophy. The point the Senator raises about extra resources and access to the hub for our political colleagues is fair. I will raise that because it would make sense for when applications are processing. The arrangements in the South with members of the Garda as witnesses can cause difficulty with tracking witnesses too. That area is being examined to see if we can improve and streamline it. There has been a significant effort in the Passport Service to deal with the number of applications received over the past year. The dedicated team to deal with applications from Northern Ireland should help too. I will bring the issues the Senator raised back to the Minister.

The Department of Foreign Affairs has made an unprecedented investment in the Passport Service over the past 12 months. This investment in people and systems has had a considerable impact on the level of service being provided by the Passport Service. More than 720,000 passports have been issued to date in 2022. In comparison, a total of 634,000 passports were issued in the whole of 2021. By the middle of the year, the Passport Service had already surpassed the total number of passports issued since last year. We know the pressure it is under because all of us in both of these Houses deal with queries about passports through our offices every day and try to contact the Passport Service. There is pressure on the whole system, but it is responding. The increase in the number of people involved in the system is certainly helping.

While 2021 was an unusual year, figures from 2019, which was the previous busiest year before the pandemic, show that the Passport Service is outperforming 2019 figures by almost 20%. More than 570 staff have been assigned to the Passport Service since June 2021, with more than 200 new staff assigned since May of this year. These recruitment efforts, coupled with the targeted deployment of staff to work on applications from Northern Ireland, will significantly impact the turnaround times for complex first-time applications, including those from our citizens resident in the North. I hope that is of assistance to the Senator.