Senator Seán Kyne has urged people to check their passports and apply on-time for renewals and particularly for first time applications.
The Galway senator has said that Covid has meant that many people didn’t renew their passports over the last two years, leading to a backlog in the processing of applications.
“First time applications are taking up to 35 working days to process, where documentation is in order,” he said, but if there are errors then processing times are increased.
“One of the issues that has arisen relates to the signing of consent forms by parents in the presence of a Garda, with 2 different dates provided on the form leading to a new form request.”
Similarly, ‘Passport Express’ applications can be difficult to expedite individually as they are stored in bundles of paper files, for security reasons.
Senator Kyne urged people to use the online passport service, apply in time, check consent form, signatures and dates.
“Extra staff have been hired by the Passport Service to deal with the increased workload but the pent-up demand for holidays and the Covid backlog means there are increased demands which the service is trying to deal with,” he said.
