'Better communication needed,' says Simon Coveney, to avoid passport application errors

First-time passports take longer at about 30 days and a lot of people haven't checked their passports because they haven't been travelling for the last few years because of Covid.

The State needs to get better at communicating with people to avoid high levels of errors in passport forms which are causing huge delays, Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney has said.

With 195,000 people awaiting the arrival of their passport, Mr Coveney said the system is producing a record number of passports daily, about 5,000, in a bid to deal with the backlog.