Passport Services
Dail Éireann — 2023-06-15
============================================================

Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

I appreciate the Deputy's comments. A number of Deputies have commented on the helpfulness of the staff of the Department of Foreign Affairs and in the Passport Office in particular. I take the Deputy's point that not everybody can go online but people should seek assistance to do so, where possible, because it is a very effective and much faster service. I will take away the Deputy's viewpoint. I will talk again to the team in the Passport Office about the situation in respect of paper-based applications. Some senior citizens may not be as competent in the use of online platforms but they should not be in any way disadvantaged by their use of a paper-based application.
I am not clear why any passport application should have been in the system since January. If the Deputy sends details, we can examine that and perhaps learn lessons from the situation.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-06-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:01+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-06-15