Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party)
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450. To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality the number of staff working directly in the processing of visa/immigration applications, by year, from 2010 to date; and the number of applications processed in each year, in tabular form. [42666/23]

Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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I can advise the Deputy that the Immigration Service of my Department currently operate from seven overseas Visa Offices in addition to the Visa Office in Dublin. They are located in Abuja, Beijing, London, Moscow, Ankara, Abu Dhabi and New Delhi. In addition, the Department of Foreign Affairs process certain visa applications in Irish Embassies abroad under delegated sanction from my Department.

As the Deputy will be aware, the Department of Justice underwent significant organisational change in 2019, which saw the complete reorganisation of the Department’s structure, therefore staffing figures for earlier years are not available in the manner sought.

The below table shows the number staff assigned to Visa division from 2019 onwards. This number includes senior management, customer service staff as well as staff processing visa applications in my Dublin visa office and the 7 visa offices abroad.

These totals do not include staff that process applications under delegated sanction through the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Staffing figures are provided for those handling Visa applications only, as opposed to those staff processing other categories of immigration applications, registrations and permissions to remain.

The table below sets out the number of visa applications processed from 2010 onwards as requested. It is important to note that the figures in the tables below relate to all visas processed regardless of the location of the Visa Office or Embassy which carried out the actual processing.