Passport Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-10-01
============================================================

Colm Burke (FG), Cork North-Central

I thank the Minister very much. It is important that I first acknowledge that huge improvements have been made by the Passport Office. In fairness to the staff, they are extremely helpful when we do contact the office. My concern is that in a lot of cases where we run into problems, it relates to young children. If parents have two or three children who they are trying to sort out passports for, it is very stressful. When the notice comes and they are advised that it is 15 working days, people get even more stressed out. This is something we need to look at.
Equally, we need to look at the whole issue of advising people about getting applications in on time. I think the requirement should be that people should try, if at all possible, to get applications in four months before the time of a flight, because issues can arise. If two issues arise, for example, then there could be two periods of 15 working days. That is where the real stress comes from. This is something we might try to look at to see how we can help address the situation. The other question that comes up quite a bit is in relation to photographs for young children. It is a real difficulty, and something we need to look at as well.

---

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/2026-10-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:01:00+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-10-01