I highlight a serious contradiction at the heart of the immigration and passport system, which raises serious concerns for national security, consistency and public trust. I will start with the Irish passport system. Every Irish citizen goes through a rigorous process to get a passport. Parents applying for their child's first passport must submit the long-form birth certificate, photographic identification and proof of address, all of which must be signed off on by An Garda Síochána. It takes weeks, sometimes months, for the processing of that standard, which is strict, as it should be, to be completed.

Let us look now at what is happening under another arm of the State. People who enter Ireland with no identification at all - no passport, birth certificate or official documents - are being allowed to apply for asylum and, later, in some cases, Irish citizenship. In certain circumstances, where they cannot provide identification, they are allowed to submit a sworn affidavit instead, that is, a legal document that simply declares who they are.

Once that affidavit is accepted and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade grants asylum, an application for a naturalisation certificate is accepted without question and without issue, following which a passport may be issued with no further checks and balances or questions. This raises a serious issue. One arm of the State is now applying rigorous verification standards while another is accepting unverified personal claims in the form of sworn statements when it has no way to confirm the truth. Even more worrying is that the replies I received to parliamentary questions I put to both the Department of foreign affairs and the Department of justice confirm that we do not track or count the many people who are granted citizenship or passports in this way. The State is simply not counting them.

I will put this number in perspective for the Minister. Some 775,000 passports were issued in the period from January 2024 to August 2024. It is anticipated that the number will be 1 million by the end of this year. Some 56,000 of those applications came from the county of Cork, where my own constituency is located. Of course, the vast majority of these applications are legitimate. Should we take it that all of those applications were subject to scrutiny and full verification?

This is not about compassion; it is about consistency, national security and waking up to the fact that naivety or laxity can be weaponised against us. Does the Minister accept that there is a gap and serious weaknesses in the standards of the passport and naturalisation process? Will he confirm that every single applicant for asylum or protection is being fingerprinted and identified as they come into this country?

I will answer Deputy O'Flynn's last question while it is fresh in my mind. Yes, anyone who comes in claiming international protection is fingerprinted and assessed against the Eurodac system.

Are all the machines working?

That happens to anyone who arrives into a port. The Deputy raised issues with the passport system. We all want to speed up the passport system as much as possible so that people can get their passports quickly. The Deputy then raised the issue of people who seek citizenship through naturalisation. I had the great privilege of being down in Killarney on Monday when a judge was handing out citizenship. I was there to celebrate the citizenship of new Irish citizens. The Deputy would be surprised at the number of people there who have been in Ireland for years. I hope Mr. David Evans, also known as the Edge, does not mind me mentioning him but he has some public prominence and he was one of the people who received Irish citizenship. Like everyone in this House, I had assumed he was an Irish citizen but in fact he came to Ireland from Wales with his parents when he was one year of age. The Deputy should know that there is a very vigorous system in the Department of justice for the purposes of assessing citizenship applications. By way of example, most of the people I met down in Killarney have been in this country for many years.

The Deputy also raised issues regarding people claiming international protection having arrived without documentation and the affidavits they subsequently swear. I will provide some statistics in respect of the excellent work being done by the border management unit within my Department. This unit is doing doorstep operations at Dublin Airport on a much more consistent basis. In 2024, the border management unit carried out 7,325 doorstep operations at Dublin Airport. By the end of May this year, it had already carried out 2,453 such operations. The border management unit is doing a significant amount of work.

If a person comes in claiming international protection, that person is entitled to have his or her application considered and processed. It is the same in every EU country and in the UK. What I am trying to do is to speed up that process, so people are not staying in Ireland for a number of years while waiting for their applications to be finalised and determined. It is much fairer to those people and to the system if they are given prompt decisions. If we get prompt decisions - I am seeking to have decisions made within a period of three months in the first instance and on appeal - we will not have the type of situation the Deputy is concerned about. Where people have been granted international protection, they are perfectly entitled to stay and may subsequently apply for citizenship. If they have not been granted international protection, they will not be entitled to stay. That is the way the system is dealing with the matter. It is a complicated issue but vigilance is at a high level in the Departments of justice and foreign affairs.

Does the Minister believe it is acceptable that Irish passports and citizenship can be granted by his Government without proper documentation? That is the question here. That is what it is really about. All the Minister has done in his answer is to confirm that people can enter this country without identification, claim asylum and sign a sworn affidavit saying who they are without proving who they are and without us being able to check. We are not even counting these people. I put four questions to both the Minister's Department and the Department of foreign affairs and the responses confirm all of this. We have to keep proper State records. This is about national security. It is about identifying who is coming into our country before we grant them citizenship or an Irish passport. The Minister knows as well as I do how you are put through the wringer when you have to apply for a passport for your child, which is only right. All of us in the House have experience of trying to get passports for people who are rushing to get them.

I want the Deputy to know that Irish passports and citizenship are not granted easily. I am sure that if the Minister for foreign affairs were here, he would confirm that is true of passports. With regard to citizenship, many colleagues in this House ask me about citizenship applications. They criticise how long they take and ask why the process is so lengthy. The reason is that you have to do very significant vetting and testing before an individual is granted citizenship. That is done vigorously. The criticism I usually face from people in the House is that it takes too long and that the process should be sped up.

With regard to people coming to Ireland claiming international protection, as I have told the Deputy, people who arrive in any EU country without documentation are entitled to claim asylum. However, if they are discovered to have destroyed documentation, that is a criminal offence and people have been prosecuted for that offence under the Immigration Act. Our systems are getting more vigorous.