Vol. 495 No. 1
138 Mr. N. Ahern asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs the policy in relation to requests to have passports updated at weekends or out of office hours; the details for the current year on the number of requests made and facilitated; and to analyse results, if possible, between holiday use and other emergency or business use. [19640/98]
The Department of Foreign Affairs has a duty officer on call outside normal office hours to deal with matters requiring immediate attention. Duty officers are frequently asked to issue passports in situations of urgency or in emergencies.
The guidelines under which they operate are that passports should normally be issued only when they are satisfied that the person concerned wants a passport for reasons of (1) genuine and substantial distress such as the death or funeral of a relative or a relative dying abroad, (2) urgent business abroad, particularly where Ireland is a beneficiary, or (3) marriage abroad or a couple going on a honeymoon when one of them finds a passport to have been lost or mislaid.
Duty officers frequently receive requests which fall outside these categories, such as from people departing on holidays abroad who have mislaid their passports or find that they are out of date. Duty officers are not obliged to issue a passport in such cases. However, they may do so at their discretion, depending on their assessment of the individual circumstances and the time pressure arising from their priority duties. It will be appreciated that, in addition to passport matters, duty officers of the Department of Foreign Affairs are required to attend to a wide range of the Department's business outside of normal working hours.
The validity of passports issued by duty officers is normally limited to the duration of the trip in connection with which the application is made. The holder may subsequently apply for a replacement passport of full validity.
In the period 1 January to 2 October 1998 duty officers issued 567 passports outside normal office hours.
Records are not kept of the numbers of requests made nor of the circumstances in which passports are issued on an emergency basis by the duty officer.
