Ossian Smyth has defended the disastrous Digital Covid Cert helpline that is still hanging up on people or keeping them waiting hours on the line.
The junior minister with special responsibility for digital services in government is claiming that the swamped helpline is “massively successful” despite the ongoing problems.
Only last week it emerged that one woman was left waiting over 12 hours - two six hour stints - at the end of a phone line desperately looking for help before travelling to Malta.
Mr Smith has also reneged on a promise to allow vaccinated Irish citizens living in Northern Ireland access their certs through our portal.
He promised that this anomaly would be fixed “shortly” when he spoke on RTE’s Today with Claire Byrne show last month.
But when he was back on the show on Thursday he kicked the can down the road again on this issue and would not commit to any timeline to help these Irish citizens.
The Irish Mirror revealed last month that the helpline that was receiving tens of thousands of calls a day after international travel reopened was being manned by only 30 people.
Unsurprisingly, less than an hour after the helpline opened, and on the day of our report, the phone lines crashed and were unreachable for many, with multiple hour delays for anyone that could get on the line.
The Mirror rang the dedicated helpline a number of times yesterday afternoon yesterday to test current waiting times after Mr Smith hailed its “incredible” success to date.
Following the usual automated options - which took a couple of minutes on their own - the call either ended automatically or we experienced long delays.
Despite this, Mr Smith said: “We’ve issued three million certificates in a joint programme across six different government departments and it has been massively successful at allowing people to travel internationally.
He added: “It has been an incredibly successful situation, but we will extend it to Irish passport holdes in the UK.”
Mr Smith praised his Covid cert helpline and said a sign of its success has been the fact that over three million certs have been posted out so far.
However, this still leaves almost a million adults with no cert, and tens of thousands of those with a cert are ringing the helpline because of problems with the certs they have received.
Mr Smith also advised that people can also go to a self-service Digital Covid Cert portal online for assistance too.
This can be found at: www.gov.ie and by following the links to the Digital Covid Cert pages.
