There has been a five-fold increase in complaints made to the Passport Office so far this year in comparison to 2019, new figures have revealed.
There has also been a significant increase in the number of complaints forwarded to the Ombudsman. Up to June 20, there have been 359 complaints made to the passport office with 90 raised with the Ombudsman.
In 2019 there were just 77 complaints made by citizens and only six referred to the Ombudsman. In 2021 there were 371 complaints to the Passport Office and 61 of these complaints were escalated to the Ombudsman.
Read More : Passport Office gets 3,000 applications a day amid huge backlog
Reacting to the figures, Social Democrats co-leader Catherine Murphy said concerns remain over the service.
She told the Irish Mirror: "I find it unacceptable for a public service body to have received 720 complaints directly over 150 to the ombudsman in less than two years.
"There are still serious concerns in relation to performance of the passport office in relation to service delivery, what are their key performance indicators and who manages these?”
Ms Murphy raised the matter at the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to which John Conlan, Department of Foreign Affairs’ chief operating officer said: “We would like our complaints to be much much lower and that's what we're going to strive for.
“We're going to strive to get back to the 2019 levels.
“We've just been so impacted by Covid and how we could operate the offices and run the offices and I accept people got frustrated and more complaints came in.”
Meanwhile, more than 63,000 passport applications are on hold because the Passport Service needs more information from applicants.
Department of Foreign Affairs officials told PAC on Thursday that it currently has 167,000 passport applications on hand, of which over 80% were made online.
READ NEXT :
