Senator Gerard Craughwell - speech from 2 Nov 2021

Senator Gerard Cropple, Minister, you are welcome to the House. This is the first time I have had the opportunity to address you since your elevation, so I would like to congratulate you on that. You were a very decent colleague when I first came into this House, so I wish you well as you go forward in your ministerial role. So, Minister, the Department has paused the processing of foreign birth registration applications when Ireland was at Level 5 on the National Framework of Living with COVID-19 2020. You indicated, or your colleague the Minister indicated last year, that applications were being held securely and would be processed when normal services resumed at Level 3 of the Framework. Minister, it is now 2021. Nightclubs, pubs and restaurants are open, but the foreign birth registrations remain paused and new applications and existing applicants have no indication when theirs will be processed. At a Conservative estimate, the current backlog stands at 32,000 applications. Even before the pandemic, the waiting period for a foreign birth registration was up to two years. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in two periods in 2020 where processing of foreign birth registration was paused to assist with other essential work, such as providing consular assistance to Irish citizens overseas. This resulted in 26 weeks of 2020 where the processing of foreign birth registration applications were suspended. Given the importance of foreign birth registration to people's lives, surely other staff could or should have been deployed in this role and the processing of applications continued, particularly when the Department was aware of the high volume of applications due to Brexit. I fully understand that the foreign birth registration process is complex and complicated, involving official documents over several generations and multiple jurisdictions. But applicants invest considerable time in gathering authentication and submitting legal documents, and then are left in a legal limbo due to the service being suspended. The Minister stated in the Dáil earlier this year that additional resources would be brought into the process applications. I would like to ask you today, Minister, how many new staff are working in the Foreign Birth Registration Office, and what progress has been made in expediting the significant backlog? Many citizens have contacted my office about foreign birth registrations, some need to get Irish passports to travel throughout Europe to work and to visit sick family members. Others cannot leave the country with their newborn children, as their own situation has not been legalised. I know of retirees whose parents and grandparents were Irish, who now wish to spend the remainder of their lives in their home country, people for whom time is of the essence. I am aware of children who are stuck in war-torn countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, who are prevented from travelling to Ireland until the application of foreign birth registration are processed and they can apply for Irish passport. The closure of the service has seriously impacted family reunification and causes trauma to many families. This is not just a matter of inconvenience, it is a matter of citizens' rights, and they are being denied access to the service to which they are legally entitled to, and it is only a matter of time before a legal challenge is mounted. Minister, 2021 is drawing to a close, the service is still paused, and I am hoping that today that you will have some good news for the thousands of people whose lives are also very regrettably paused as a consequence. I look forward to your reply, Minister. Thank you. Mr Farrell. Mr Farrell. Doer magadek ag eardMIN. Mw hwikus leishュ on cá nid hות o crwcwil. The Department of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Foreign Affairs is actually in Israel today, and he has asked me to speak on his behalf. The Department of Foreign Affairs is responsible for citizenship by descent through the Foreign Births Register under the National Act of the Citizenship Act. As the Senator will be aware, people may apply for Irish citizenship through foreign birth registration if one of their grandparents was born in Ireland or if one of their parents was an Irish citizen at the time of their birth, even if the parent was not born in Ireland. Once a person is entered on the foreign birth register, they are an Irish citizen and, as the Senator says, entitled to apply for an Irish passport. To protect the integrity of this process, foreign birth registrations require careful processing in order to validate the identity of the applicant and the entitlement to citizenship. The applications undergo rigorous and detailed checking by experienced staff at the passport service. Demand for foreign birth registration reached unprecedented levels following the Brexit referendum in the UK. Prior to that, we had about 5,000 to 6,000 applications for foreign birth registration every year. But after the referendum, we had a peak in 2019 of 32,000 online applications received during that year. Prior to the pandemic, the processing time stood at 18 months due to the huge increase post-Brexit. Then of course that peak coincided with COVID-19. Operations at the passport office were severely disrupted. During this period, it was necessary to pause the foreign birth registration process to focus on urgent passport services. When passport services were scaled up in May 2021 to more normal operational levels, foreign birth registration staff were redeployed to help with the delivery of essential passport services. They have continued to do so in relation to continuing strong demand for passport services. They are not the only people within the department redeployed to what we might call as normal passport services. There is a huge amount of staff has been redeployed from various quarters of the department to deal with that. The foreign birth registration service does continue to consider urgent requests to expedite applications on a case-by-case basis, such as expectant parents or stateless persons. I do understand a number of them were processed in Afghanistan, but if there are any particular cases, you can certainly let me know. 5,000 emergency cases have been processed in 2021. Expectant parents and other emergency applicants should make contact with the passport service customer service hub to advise other circumstances. The passport service is actively preparing to resume processing foreign birth registration applications as soon as possible. I can assure that the department is fully committed to allocating the necessary resources to this service to help with the high volume of applications with a focus on reducing the backlog that the Senator has rightly described. In the medium term, of course, changes to the foreign birth registration process to increase efficiencies and improve the customer experience will be delivered under the next phase of the department's passport reform program, which is ongoing, under which there is a huge amount of work ongoing, to generally reform the process and to make it much more efficient. But I should say that at the moment, and this is not directly related to what the Senator talks about, the renewal online of passports is taking place very, very quickly. There is certainly, again, this is separate to what the Senator is talking about, but certainly in relation to paper applications, there is certainly a big backlog, so I would encourage people to apply online in so far as they can in relation to passports, but what they said about the foreign birth registration is the rest of the speech that they gave to the Senator there. Thank you. I want to thank the Minister. Minister, thank you. I appreciate you are here representing the Minister for Foreign Affairs. You might bring back the message to the department. I mean, some of the stories that are arriving on my desk about families being split while one parent who has a passport can travel back here, but because they had a child overseas, they can't travel. And then there are the retirees that I mentioned who want to live here, who are financially viable to live here, and various other family circumstances. There is none of them, and I know you are a long time in the game of politics, and you know that there is none of these families that find this easy. It is really, really difficult. So if we can do something, if the Minister can do something to get the Foreign Birth Registration Office up and running again, we are standing at about 32,000. That is a huge amount of stuff, and I do know it is a more complex processing system than the ordinary one. So I do thank you again for your time, Minister, and if you just bring that message back. Thank you. I certainly will be discussing this with the Minister and indeed officials in the department, and it is an issue that has come across my own desk from time to time. What I would say is though, that the Passport Service is working very closely with the Human Resources Division of Foreign Affairs and with the Public Appointment Service on an ongoing basis to get more staff in. That is the bottom line for the entire system of passport applications and particularly foreign registrations as well. There is a huge forecast of demand for the foreign registration, but also for passports in general. And the government is making major investment in the future of the passport office. Over the next couple of years, the department will replace the technology underpinning the service, which will deliver efficiencies, not just to passport services, but also to foreign registration. There is an additional €10 million from the budget being invested to help deal with passports. What can help the situation is for people to apply early for passports, people to apply online as best they can, if they can avoid putting in paper applications, to do so as early as possible. There is going to be a huge amount of passport applications between now and next summer. We know that because we know the amount of passports have now expired. So to help in the process that the Senator is talking about, if everybody could get their applications in early and online in so far as we can, that will help everything in the passport office. But we are looking to recruit a lot more staff to deal with all of these issues. Thank you.