At present, there approximately 112,000 people awaiting passports nationwide.
4,596 of these are in Cork.
He says that despite a rise in the number of applications, as people being to travel once again, the number of people working to process passports has fallen.
Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire told RedFM News that this is causing a lot of stress to would-be travellers:
"It's for holidays but it's also for people visiting relatives that they haven't seen for a long time. The situation is that you've got 112,000 applications sitting there, and the rate at which people are getting them back isn't good enough. I understand that there's over 4,500 applications connected to the passport office in Cork. People are getting frustrated, they are getting worried, their flights are coming up and they're still waiting for the password, even though they might have applied for it in good time. So what we're calling for is additional staff to clear this backlog urgently."
