Aidan Farrelly (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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228. To ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade the average time to process foreign birth register applications; and if he will provide a schedule, by number of persons and country, waiting to have their application processed to completion. [15332/25]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, 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.

Foreign Birth Registration, by its nature, is a detailed and complex process, often involving official documentation relating to three generations and issued by several jurisdictions. Such documents take considerable time to validate. Applications are processed in the order in which they are submitted. Processing time begins when all supporting documents are received by the Passport Service, and applications that require further supporting documentation will take longer to process.

The time taken to process Foreign Birth Registration has decreased from over two and a half years in 2023 to approximately nine months currently. This improvement is a result of the investment of significant extra resources to the FBR Unit over the past two years.

There are approximately 45,000 FBR applications currently in the system. The number of applications with the Passport Service (PPS) for processing is 36,000, and the number of applications with the applicants (i.e. the PPS is awaiting documentation) is 9,000.

The number of applications with the Passport Service for processing, as listed by country of residence of the applicant, is outlined below in tabular form. For data protection reasons, applications from countries with fewer than 100 applicants have been merged under the OTHER heading.