19 November 2021
Applications for Irish passports are set to surpass 1.7 million next year according to Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney.
The Minister told the Dáil there were currently 108,000 applications being processed.
Before the pandemic processing took as long as 18 months due to the “unprecedented surge” in applications following the Brexit referendum.
The Minister said the resumption of services would involve dealing with the backlog from 133 countries across the world.
The largest number of applications are from England at 16,093, followed by the US with 7,815, Scotland with 1,512 and 1,004 from Australia.
Current processing times are 10 working days for simple adult online renewals, 15 working days for complex or child online renewals, 40 working days for first-time online applications and eight weeks for postal applications.
