THE DEPARTMENT of Foreign Affairs decided against recalling older passports following the use of forgeries in the assassination a Hamas leader earlier this year on the basis it would cost over €40 million and cause major administration problems.
The Passport Service of the department considered the recall of all passports issued before 2005 after it emerged that eight fake Irish passports were used in the murder in Dubai of Mahmoud al Mabhouh, a senior figure in the militant Palestinian movement.
All eight passports were forgeries and all were of the type issued before sophisticated security features were introduced in 2005.
The service’s report for Government concluded that the forgeries “were manufactured or acquired by an agency of the State of Israel”, a reference to Mossad.
In June, the Government acted on the findings of the report, and a separate Garda inquiry, by ordering an official from the Israeli embassy in Dublin to leave the State.
Documents released to The Irish Timesunder the Freedom of Information Act disclose that the question of recalling the less sophisticated passports issued prior to 2005 was quickly dismissed by the Passport Service.
In internal communications earlier this year, the director of the service Joseph Nugent said there were over 2.5 million passports issued prior to 2005 that were still valid and in use.
“At this time the Passport Service could not cope with replacing this volume in any short time period,” he wrote.
Mr Nugent said that such a change would add approximately four years of volume to the existing work of the service – some 600,000 Irish passports are issued each year worldwide. The suggestion came at a time when there were lengthy delays in the issuing of passports because of an industrial dispute involving staff working in the passport section of the department.
The other major logistical problem identified by Mr Nugent was that issuing 2.5 million new passports would lead to a “spike” in 10 years when the documents expired, unless the validity was staggered or the replacement was phased.
Mr Nugent said the cost of providing new booklets for 2.5 million passports would be €40 million.
Mr Nugent said there was no necessity to recall the pre-2005 passport on the basis that it was valid, internationally recognised, conformed to international standards and was of a type used by many other countries.
In a probable reference to the fact that forged British, Australian and French passports were also used by the Israeli assassination team, the e-mail stated: “We are not aware of other recalls of similar type document in any other country . . .”
The summary version of the Passport Service report, also released under the Freedom of Information Act, said the names of some Irish individuals had been used in the fake documents. But no records were found of individuals with the same name and date-of-birth combination as those used in the forged passports.
The report found that although six of the eight forged documents used numbers from real passports, none had completely stolen the identity of Irish citizens, as happened with British and Australian passports. It also found that the six Irish citizens whose numbers were used were not known to each other and had not travelled to the Middle East.
Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin issued a ministerial certificate under Section 25 of the Freedom of Information Act to exempt some of the documents requested by The Irish Times.
This provision allows the Minister to refuse to release records that “are in his view sufficiently sensitive or serious to justify such an exemption”.