TDs and senators make 10,000 calls to passport hotline
TDs and senators have made more than 10,000 calls to a dedicated hotline for politicians to check passport applicants so far this year.
The phone line, set up solely for Oireachtas members, stopped working for a time last week leading to ‘panic’ among people looking to go on holiday.
Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney has said the current demand for passports is ‘unprecedented’. More than 400,000 passports have been issued this year already, compared to 634,000 in all of last year, while over 130,000 applications were received in April alone in 2022. Mr Coveney told TDs in the Dáil this week they cannot turn their offices into a ‘passport service’.
However, Independent TD Michael Healy-Rae disagreed. He said TDs are ‘messengers for the people’ and that he has no issue if that means getting passports for constituents.
The Kerry TD wants the resthrough toration of an ‘express service’ that previously allowed TDs to get passports processed for constituents on the same day.
He described the current pace as ‘extraordinarily slow’.
Fine Gael TD for Mayo Michael Ring, who was one of the Oireachtas members unable to get through on the hotline, said ‘people are losing holidays because they’re not getting their passport on time’. Fine Gael TD for Kildare North Bernard Durkan likened the chances of getting on the hotline to ‘the National Lottery’. ‘We’ve told the minister [Mr Coveney] that we’re under pressure from constituents [to get passports processed], especially for first-time travellers. There’s thousands of them,’ he told the Irish Daily Mail.
A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs said it ‘did experience technical difficulties with its telephone systems recently’ but that this has ‘since been resolved’. ‘We can confirm that our customer service hub and web chat service is fully operational,’ the spokesman said.
Processing first-time passport applications is proving particularly challenging as an application for a child must be stamped at the local Garda station. Mr Ring said ‘casually staffed’ Garda stations were leading to further delays.
He questioned the need for the existing system and said the Department of Social Protection
has enough details on families to verify if the application is lawful. ‘The Department of Social Protection should be involved in processing the applications. It is one of the best in the country... The Passport Office is in chaos again; this cannot go on for the summer,’ he told the Mail.
There are 88,000 first-time online passport applications in the system at present.
In response to a parliamentary question from Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon, Mr Coveney said incomplete applications were a major problem. ‘Of those, 39,000 (44%) are incomplete passport applications which require further action from the applicant,’ he said.
Mr Coveney acknowledged there is ‘an issue with improving the verification process between the Passport Office and Garda stations’, which predominately affects rural areas where stations have limited opening hours. But he added: ‘We are not doing this for the sake of it. There is a fraud issue relating to passports and there are risks around child abduction.’
‘Risks around child abduction’