THE PROVISION of additional passport offices in the State has been suggested by Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin because of the level of applications.

He said “there is actually a case for the northwest, in my view, and in the south” because “there have been so many applications from the north”.

Mr Martin was commenting as he told the Dáil that up to May 17th there was a backlog of 62,008 passport applications in the system, which was a “direct result” of the ongoing industrial action by the CPSU.

The Minister said applications made directly at passport office counters or through the passport express service were taking up to 25 working days to process, while those submitted through ordinary post were taking up to eight weeks.

Staff have been working overtime for some weeks and this has “kept the level of increased backlog to a minimum and in recent days we have seen a marginal reduction in the backlog”.

But he warned that the backlog “will only be overcome when CPSU calls off its industrial action and co-operates with the recruitment of temporary staff”.

Sanction had been given for an additional 50 temporary staff, recruited each summer, and Mr Martin appealed to the CPSU to “allow a significant number of currently unemployed workers to take on paid employment and assist in reducing the sizeable backlog of passport applications”.

Fine Gael foreign affairs spokesman Billy Timmins said that the passport office staff were “a great example of good public service work in this country, offering an efficient service” but “brought into disrepute by this go-slow”. He too appealed to the union to allow the temporary staff be assigned to deal with the backlog.

Mr Timmins said it was important to have a passport office, “somewhere along the western seaboard between Limerick and Donegal”.

Mr Martin told him “there is a fair point to be made apart altogether from the industrial action, in terms of contingency issues, in terms of an accident or something happening to a building; there is actually a case for the northwest, in my view, and the south”.