The Irish Passport Office has announced a series of measures to combat lengthy processing backlogs.
So far this year 540,000 passports have been issued by the office and 1.7 million applications are expected by the end of 2022.
Head of the Passport Service Siobhan Byrne has said the service is bringing in new measures to speed up the process.
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Firstly, the number of customer service staff in the Irish Passport Office is set to be doubled in the coming weeks.
The office is also rolling out a new system to speed up garda certification. When the witnessing garda cannot be contacted by the Passport Office, the query will now be sent to garda management to be processed.
And thirdly, Ms Byrne confirmed that passport applications containing errors will no longer be sent to the back of the queue, as was the case a couple of months ago.
Speaking on Newstalk, Ms Byrne said the office has had to "balance" staff in terms of how many people are processing passports and how many are working in the customer service hub.
She said: "I think everyone will agree that the priority has to be processing the passports and getting as many passports as we can into our customer’s hands to allow them to travel.
"But it is also important that we communicate with our customers and we fully accept that. That’s why we’re doubling the number of staff we would have in our customer service hub in the next couple of weeks."
She said that the Passport Office is hiring "all the time" but said there has been a worldwide struggle to find workers.
"The staffing challenge is not unique to ourselves, the public service or even our country," Ms Byrne said.
"It is an international problem at the moment but we are increasing our staff in that area, so we currently have people working within our customer service hub and we hope to double that within the next two weeks."
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