James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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314. To ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade the status of a foreign birth registration application which was submitted on the 2 September 2021 by a person (details supplied); and if he will make a statement on the matter. [59419/22]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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My Department is responsible for processing Foreign Birth Registration (FBR) applications for people who are born abroad and claim Irish Citizenship through a grandparent born in Ireland or through a parent who has claimed citizenship also through FBR, Naturalisation or Post Nuptial Citizenship.

Demand for this service increased significantly as a result of the Brexit vote in the UK. In 2015, prior to Brexit, a total of 6,000 entries were made to the register. In 2019, a peak number of 19,000 entries were made to the Foreign Births Register.

The service was also impacted by necessary Covid-19 restrictions in 2020 and 2021 and the unprecedented demand for passports seen to date in 2022.

My Department has put in place a number of measures to address the volume of FBR applications currently on hand with a view to significantly reducing the processing time for these applications by the end of this year. These measures, which include increased staffing directed towards the processing of FBR applications, are already having a positive impact on the number of applications being processed each month. The number of FBR applications processed per month has doubled in both September and October, with over 1,000 processed in August, over 2,000 processed in September and almost 5,000 processed in October.

Supporting documents for the application to which the Deputy has referred were received on 15 September 2022 and are being stored in a secure environment until the application is checked for entitlement.