Jim O'Keeffe (Cork South West, Fine Gael)
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Question 915: To ask the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform the number of citizenship applications for naturalisation; the average delay involved in dealing with such applications; and if he has proposals to put in place a more efficient system for dealing with such applications. [20196/07]

Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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I refer the Deputy to my reply to Parliamentary Question 221 of Thursday, 5 July 2007. Since that reply, in excess of 2,000 new applications for naturalisation have been received. This means that the number of applications which have yet to be processed to a conclusion has now risen to almost 17,000. The average processing time remains on average 30 months. Additional staff were recently assigned to the Citizenship Section of my Department in order to ensure that all such applications are processed as quickly as possible.