How Ireland fixed its passport system
From round-the-block lineups to printing in minutes, we talked to someone who was there
A government initiative in Ireland destroyed dozens of jobs for the country’s youth, yet was widely celebrated by ministers and the public.
You see, Ireland was once plagued by a slow, bureaucratic passport system. Everything was physical, and if you wanted to travel, you had to stand in queues that sometimes wrapped around the block. To make the queueing fair, the government gave out numbers on a first-come, first-served basis that reserved your place in line.
Entrepreneurial Dubliners saw their chance, and would arrive early at the offices, grabbing low numbers for the queue. Then they’d sell these to people who arrived later, letting them skip the line.
Today, those jobs are gone. Thanks to a successful modernization effort, Ireland now has one of the best passport systems in the world. Renewals for adults and children can be completed entirely online; even first-time passport applicants can enlist the local police department to testify to their identity.
This took a lot of work. A reform team began with the lineups, replacing them with online reservation systems that freed up passport workers to reduce the huge backlog. Then they worked with policymakers and designers to build a renewal process that leverages biometrics and smartphones to make the whole process easier.
Contrast that with Canada: While Ireland launched online renewals in 2017, Canada is rolling out a trial in 2025 for a limited number of applicants—and when you use the online renewal, your old passport stops working. We’re on the right track, but we have a lot of work left to do. (If you haven’t already, you should watch this earlier episode on Canadian passports first; it’s short, and will give you a lot of context.)
To continue our deep dive into the passport service, we caught up with John Savage, who is a Professor of Practice at the University of Limerick and one of the people who brought Ireland’s passports into the Internet age.
Fascinating case study here. The emergent markeplace around queue numbers realy shows how inefficiency creates perverse incentives. When the system design forces people to waste hours ina line, suddenly there's economic value in grabbing a spot early and reselling it. What makes Ireland's approach particulary smart isn't just the technolgy upgrade but eliminating the scarcity that made the arbitrage posible in the first place.