Paul Murphy: Calls Passport Delays a Public Service Failure

It's very evident that we have a passport crisis in this country. Lots of people ringing hundreds of times to no avail to try to get their passport applications processed in time for their travel arrangements, facing looming departure dates and making the whole process extremely stressful for them. It's also very clear from this debate, Deputy O' Snodding made the point earlier, that probably if you go into any constituency office of a TD across the country, you'll find a phone with the wait music of trying to get through to the TD's line for a passport, obviously taking up a huge amount of time of TD's and those who work for TD's. And I do want to just challenge a kind of, seems to me like a somewhat spoken and then largely accepted premise that this whole debate is taking place within. The Minister started by saying that people contacting TD's to get information about their passports is a basic function of democracy. I couldn't disagree more, I really couldn't. Obviously I'm happy to help anyone I can help, my office is happy to help anyone we can help, but this is not a basic function of democracy, it is a failure of a public service. And it's a product of a, and it's part of a clientelist system, whereby people get inadequate public services, and then TD's place themselves between the people who are entitled to public services, it's not a favour that we're doing as TD's for them, they're entitled to these public services, they're entitled to have a passport, TD's are placed between the public services to which they should be entitled, and the people. And just become, you know, a mechanism of communication. I don't have any power to grant people passports, people who work in my office don't have any power to grant people passports. All we do is communicate back and forth with people. And like, no offence to any of the TD's, but these people don't want to be calling us about passports. They're calling us about passports because they can't get information directly from the passport. And then we have a privileged access to a special line, so they have to ring us, for us to get the information about the passport. And I just think the whole way of dealing with this, whereby we're increasing the number of staff who are going to deal with TD's queries about passports, increasing the number of queries that we can make, okay, fine, in terms of the crisis that we're in. But this isn't the answer. The answer is to have a service that people can ring up the passport office who are actually making the decisions and processing it and get the information themselves directly, without having to waste time going through us. And that's what they would prefer to do. They don't want to have to speak to us. And so we all want to help our constituents the best we can. Obviously, you know, we'll continue to do that in terms of anyone who contacts us. We also spend a bunch of time doing this. But the answer is to provide a proper public service in terms of the provision of passports in a proper timeframe. I'll make some concrete suggestions in a minute, but the fundamental thing is the resourcing of it. You have people there working extremely hard, but understaffed and not getting through the work in time. And that's like, I do fear that potholes have been replaced by passports as the thing that TD's, but it's like the TD's aren't even getting the passports. They're just communicating the information that you're still in the queue. It's not a very good use of public resources. It's just for us to pretend that we have some special access when the only thing we have access to is information. But we should just give people the information directly and resource, you know, have the people mainly working on answering the calls of the people who are calling in themselves directly, rather than forcing them to go through this extra loophole of going through a TD and making TD's important in this process when the reality is we don't have any power in terms of that. That is the biggest issue that people face is the issue of communication. People are under huge stress and anxiety trying to get the passport sorted before their travel dates. And there is huge difficulty in getting someone to talk to either by phone or using the chat function. And it seems to me that, you know, a basic point is we need staffing levels increased to ensure that they're adequate to respond to applicants in a reasonable time via phone or web chat. Other concrete points that I would make is, you know, a regular thing that happens is that you have constituents who submit their application. But weeks later, the passport office contacts them requesting further or corrected documentation. But when they send in that revised or additional documentation, the clock restarts and they get a new later estimated date for their application to be ready. And we think, you know, they shouldn't be pushed back in back to the end of the queue, but they should be left in the queue where they are and then the documentation amended rather than penalising them. Another issue that has come again and again is the issue that errors in applications not being identified in one fell swoop whereby some errors are identified, people go and fix it, then other errors are identified, which again adds to the whole time of it. The last point I'll make is in terms of the talk, the announcement today, the suggestion that the passport or the post service may be abolished immediately entirely. I mean, I agree that we should have a preference for online. We should make sure we encourage people to do online where they can. It's obviously a quicker, more efficient system. But in my opinion, it's very clear, we have to have a service available for those who can't go online. People with disabilities, older people, and they can't be and shouldn't be discriminated against because they can't go online. So I definitely think we just can't get rid of that. But yeah, the basic point I want to make is the answer here is not fundamentally to, like, improve the Oireachtas Urgent Query Service, but is to do... What? That's only a very small part. OK. Yeah, but it's a big feature of discussion here. You did say it's a basic function of democracy. We can find the problems and then try to solve them. That was the point I tried to make. Yeah. Well, waiting out a week, let's not have a crisis room conversation. So the basic point, let's improve the service so people get the service that they are entitled to. I agree. Thank you very much, Deputy Now. Thank you very much, Deputy Now.