A West Tyrone MP has called on the Irish Government and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney, to establish an Irish Passport office in Northern Ireland.
Sinn Féin’s Órfhlaith Begley claims that her office has been inundated with requests and complaints from people in the North who are seeking to obtain an Irish passport, but have faced severe delays in recent weeks due to the amount of new passports that need to be processed through the system.
The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs say that currently it takes up to eight weeks for new passports to be processed through the system, as they reportedly face a backlog of over 100,000 passport applications to process.
But Órfhlaith Begley argues that having an Irish Passport office in the North would create more capacity to process applications, as well as making the services more accessible to Irish citizens in the North…
