Almost 68,000 people in Northern Ireland have applied for Irish passports since the EU/Brexit referendum, Charlie Flanagan TD, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade has said.
Application levels from Great Britain also increased by 40.6 per cent to 64,996.
He said: “2016 was an exceptionally busy year for the Passport Service with a record number of passports issued. This represents a growth of 9 per cent over 2016 and I expect this trend to continue in the coming years.”
In 2016, 24,443 citizens were issued with our innovative new passport card, allowing them to travel to EU/EEA countries plus Switzerland with only a credit-card sized passport.
“There was a strong increase in demand for passports in the first half of the year. This was due to a variety of factors including the fact that more Irish people traveled in the first half of the year; we also had the Euros Championships and a historical spike in applications from 2006 feeding through in the 10-year renewal cycle.”
A total of 733,060 Irish passports were issued in 2016.