Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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Question 401: To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform if, in view of his recent comments that the Government does not need all the money it is raising, he will consider devoting additional resources to the immigration section to help clear the long backlogs in residency and citizenship applications, to facilitate access to the telephone helpline, which is currently available only at limited hours and at those times is extremely difficult to get through to; and to make it possible for immigration staff to respond to written and email inquiries, which is not happening at present. [29670/06]

Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)
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The allocation of resources within the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS) of my Department is kept under ongoing review by its Director General having regard to overall sanctioned staff numbers. INIS was established by the Government in 2005 in order to provide a single contact point or "one stop shop" for immigration services generally. A key priority of INIS is to continue to enhance customer service provision across the wide range of services which it provides including asylum determinations, citizenship applications, visas, repatriations, reception and integration services as well as other immigration related functions generally. With the ongoing decrease in asylum applications significant numbers of posts have been relocated from the asylum agencies to other immigration functions by INIS.

In relation to the immigration services referred to by the Deputy, as I outlined already, INIS is committed to providing a high quality service to all its customers and making every effort to process all residency applications and related queries in as timely a manner as possible. The Immigration Division of INIS has a team led system to deal with the various categories of applications for residency. Applications are dealt with strictly by date of receipt in order to have a system in operation which is fair to all customers. Where urgent residency applications are brought to the attention of the relevant section, every effort is made to facilitate them. There is an ongoing increase in the number of applications received for residency in the State. The resources allocated to process such applications are necessarily dependent on the prioritised work requirements of INIS at any one time. Because information technology plays a key role in enhancing and streamlining work processes, work is due to commence shortly on the development of a comprehensive new information technology system for the INIS which will contribute to the enhancement of service provision generally in that organisation. This new system should come into operation in late 2007.