Backlog forces Croatian woman to fly home to apply for daughter's passport

Sanja Mijalkovic said she has to vacate the rental property she has been sharing with her partner and child in Dublin and had hoped to secure an Irish passport for her daughter.

A Croatian woman is having to fly to her home country from Dublin, along with her baby, this week to secure a passport for the child — due to difficulties accessing an Irish passport here.

Sanja Mijalkovic said she has to vacate the rental property she has been sharing with her partner and child on Wednesday and had hoped to secure an Irish passport for her daughter, born last June, so they could return to Croatia for a time until her partner sources new accommodation in Dublin.

Sanja and her partner have been living and working here since 2014. Sanja works in the Convention Centre, including during the period when the Dáil was sitting there due to the pandemic.

However, while her daughter has an Irish birth certificate and all the supporting documentation has been lodged with the passport authorities since August, Sanja believes she can't wait any longer and has instead booked an appointment with the Croatian Embassy on Wednesday.

She hopes she will be provided with travel documents that will allow her a one-way trip back to Croatia — where she will then apply for a Croatian birth certificate and passport.

She said:

I am now forced to actually seek help from an embassy, to go through another lengthy and expensive process of obtaining my child's travel document.

"I do understand the Covid backlog but I cannot understand it takes months to process a passport application."

Sanja added that "no one seems to be able to tell me where my application is at or when it will be processed".

Last Tuesday, Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney said there are 10,000 postal applications and 95,000 online passport applications on hand at the Passport Service.

In response to parliamentary questions from a number of TDs, Mr Coveney said: "Of the applications that are with the Passport Service for processing, approximately 8% are past the estimated issue-by date."

He said extra efforts were being made to catch up with the backlog and that "the Passport Service is currently experiencing a high demand for first-time passports. These first-time applications are complex to process.

"Adequate staffing of the Passport Service to respond to demand remains a priority for my department and is an issue that is kept under constant review. 

"My department is actively working with the Public Appointments Service on an ongoing basis to recruit and assign additional staff to meet the current and forecasted high demand for passports. 

"In addition, the Passport Service is working with relevant divisions within my department to ensure the health and safety of all staff and is finalising plans in co-operation with the OPW to ensure that additional staff will be accommodated to meet the anticipated increased demand for passports expected in 2022."

While her daughter has an Irish birth certificate and all the supporting documentation has been lodged with the passport authorities since August, Sanja Mijalkovic believes she can't wait any longer and has instead booked an appointment with the Croatian Embassy on Wednesday.

Mr Coveney said more than 800 urgent appointments have been facilitated since the Passport Service launched an emergency service on September 27.

Sanja said she had been told she could not avail of this service. In a response sent to her late last month by the Passport Service, she was told: "Under Irish law, an applicant born in Ireland on or after 1 January 2005, and whose parents are not Irish citizens, is not automatically entitled to Irish citizenship or an Irish passport.

"We do not process these applications under the travel emergency service due to their complexity, as entitlement has not been established."