Passport delays cause disruption

AN UNPRECEDENTED demand for new passports is leading to increased delays in the number of people waiting for theirs, the Department of Foreign Affairs has said.

Passport applications are currently running at about 4,000 a day when in the past they were running at 3,000 a day. There are currently 54,000 passport applications being processed and the delay by normal mail has gone from six weeks to eight to nine weeks. For Passport Express, it has gone from 10 working days to 15 working days.

The issue was highlighted on the Colm Hayes Showon 2fm earlier this week when one Northern Irish listener rang in to say that he had applied for a passport for his daughter in early April and it had still not been returned, though the family was going on holidays on July 10th.

The listener, who gave his name as Rory, said both his daughter and his wife, who had to send her passport away to Dublin along with their daughter’s application, had been waiting for so long that they applied for a British passport instead and were expecting them imminently.

By contrast, they got through immediately to the British passport office in Belfast, even though it was a Sunday, and their application was dealt with two days later. He said they had to act because they could not get through to speak to somebody in the passport office in Dublin despite numerous attempts.

Another woman told the show that her sister and her sister’s child had been waiting for weeks for a passport via Passport Express – they were going on holidays next week.

Repeated attempts by the show to get through to the passport office were met with a message which states: “I’m sorry there is a large number of calls ahead of you in the queue so please try again later.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs said she understood the frustration of people who could not get through, but staff were “desperately trying” to clear the backlog and 85 had been recruited for the summer months.

She also said that most of the questions could be answered on the passport office website.