FINE GAEL leader Enda Kenny demanded an extended Dáil sitting so that the queues at the Passport Office could be raised.
Mr Kenny said that the Taoiseach and members of the Government had returned to the House, after an absence of two weeks, “at a time when Molesworth Street is filled with people waiting for passports and there is increasing panic in financial circles that more and more liquidations and insolvencies are being recorded”.
He did not agree, he said, that the State should fall down on its responsibility to provide the citizens with passports as they pursued their right to travel.
Labour leader Eamon Gilmore accused the Government’s “media managers” of organising “a nice picture for television to have the newly appointed Ministers driving at Áras an Uachtaráin at 6pm to receive their seals of office”.
Sinn Féin’s Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin said that within a stone’s throw of the Dáil, citizens of the State were going through a traumatic time queuing for passports.
“There is no accommodation to address these matters in the proposed ordering of business for today,” he added.
The Government’s proposal for the ordering of the day’s business was passed by 80 votes to 71.
