PEOPLE REQUIRING passports in an emergency and who were born before 1949 should apply to the British embassy for a passport, the Dáil has heard.

As the go-slow and queues outside the Dublin Passport Office continued with a backlog of “44,000, threatening to rise to 50,000” applications, Dinny McGinley (FG, Donegal South West) said those born before Ireland was declared a Republic in 1949 were entitled to a UK passport and could apply to the British embassy on Merrion Road.

Minister of State for European Affairs Dick Roche said, however: “I think we should solve our own problems.” He was responding to TDs during a special notice question or emergency debate on the industrial dispute.

Mr McGinley said: “There are people in Donegal and probably other parts of the country who are at their wits’ end now and who will be heading for the British embassy. And if what’s happening in Molesworth Street and in our passport office continues for much longer, we’re going to have the queues transferred out to that part of this city.

“But in an emergency I have recommended to a number of people if they’re not able to get it through the normal channels, our own passport [office], that they have to go out there and they will be facilitated.”

The Minister said, however, “it took us long enough to get independence and get to the State where we’re in . . . the solution is in our own hands”. He called on the CPSU to end its action, allow overtime to be worked to clear the backlog, to “rescind this particular action” and allow temporary staff come on duty.

Fine Gael foreign affairs spokesman Billy Timmins claimed the dispute “is a strike in everything but name”. The reason for the problem was the Government’s policy on pay cuts, and it should have enacted these “above the €30,000 level”. But “the general public cannot be held to ransom by one of the State’s unions”.

Labour foreign affairs spokesman Michael D Higgins said the State should “break the large number of cases into categories”, so people could get an idea of the wait involved. He criticised Ryanair for failing to accept forms of identification other than passports for internal flights and those to Britain, as its intransigence in requiring a passport “has no legal basis in European law”.