Sir, – After travelling for some 32 hours from Australia, my wife and I arrived at Dublin Airport on Friday evening. The organisation of passport control was an appallingly inefficient, thoughtless and rude welcome to visitors.
Some four or more booths were staffed to process a very large number of Irish and EU citizens and only one to process our queue of about seven non-EU ones. On swiftly finishing the much larger Irish and EU group, all these staff promptly left.
After patiently waiting in line some 30 minutes (as only three entrants were processed), a second non-EU booth was finally staffed as another flight’s worth of such entrants arrived. In our case, however, these later-flight entrants still ended up being processed before us.
Surely a better way to process non-EU entrants would be to always have a minimum of two booths, with one handling potentially difficult cases and the other the simple and speedy ones. Have all booths process travellers, after finishing the Irish and EU citizens, before staff again bolt for a work break. And, as for most airports internationally, post an experienced staff member to the front of the queue to sort non-EU entrants by nationality and ease of processing and direct them to the relevant booths accordingly.
The alternative is for a country otherwise experienced with tourism and business travellers to continue officiously treating visiting friends of Ireland as an unwanted bother. – Yours, etc,
NEIL JAMES,
Burra,
New South Wales,
Australia.