Passport customer service office set to double its staff numbers

Staff at the passport customer service hub is set to double in the coming weeks, it has been confirmed. 

There had been criticism of the difficulties encountered trying to contact the customer service office, with one TD claiming that a person had called over 100 times. 

Siobhan Byrne, Director of Passport services in the Department of Foreign Affairs said on radio on earlier on Thursday, that there is certainly “a sense of frustration” for people trying to get through on their phones.

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"This is something that has been a challenge for us, and mostly that challenge has been around staffing. The staffing challenge is not unique to ourselves and not unique to the public service or even this country. It is an international problem at the moment," Ms Byrne told the Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk. 

“We currently have 60 people working in our customer service hub and we hope to double that figure within the next two weeks,” she confirmed. 

"It is balancing act for ourselves in that we are taking on staff all the time and we have to balance it off with how many people we have on our customer service hub answering the calls, or how many people do we have processing the passports.

"I think everyone will agree the priority has to be processing the passports and getting as many passports as we can into our customers hands to allow them to travel.

"But its also important that we communicate with our customers and we fully accept that, and that is why we are doubling the number of staff we will have in our customer service hub in the next few weeks,” Ms Byrne said.

While the majority of people fill out their passport forms correctly, Ms Byrne said that 40pc of applications in the system at any time are incomplete.