Postal applications for new passports are currently taking six to eight weeks to process instead of the usual four to six weeks.
The Passport Express 10-day service is also experiencing delays, with a maximum turnaround of 14 days, a spokeswoman said.
Despite bringing on 85 extra staff and paying overtime to deal with the demand, the backlog of applications has increased in recent weeks.
The passport offices in Dublin and Cork are receiving about 4,000 applications daily, a slight fall from 4,200 at the start of the month. There are now some 54,000 applications in the system, which is an increase from the 51,628 reported on June 1st.
The demand for new passports is 12 per cent higher than comparable years, the spokeswoman said, though the figures do not include last year's because industrial action in the Passport Office would distort the figures.
Callers to passport offices in Dublin and Cork today were being greeted by a recorded message stating that, due to the high volume of queries, they could not be placed in a queue to speak with an operator.
Theresa Dwyer, assistant general secretary at the Civil Public and Services Union, said staff were doing everything possible given the very high demand.
“The public have a notion - a very wrong notion - that people can get a passport at very short notice,” she said, adding a passport was a complicated and important document. “Any difficulties that people are having just comes down to demand,” she said.
Seán Ó Fearghaíl, Fianna Fáil spokesman on foreign affairs, said TDs were no longer able to help constituents with individual cases on instructions from the passport office. “There seems to be very high demand in the current year, beyond what we’ve seen in previous years,” he said.
In-person applications at the passport office in Dublin were moving quickly today, with a waiting time of under an hour shortly before 2pm.
Aileen O’Keeffe, from Dublin 16, was queuing to replace her son’s passport after his birth certificate had been left out of the Passport Express envelope, and she advised others to avail of the service.
"The Express service is great, if you get it right," she said, noting the rejected application had come back within 10 days. "Go through the checklist and save yourself, and the State, the headache of looking after it."