Over one million Irish passports were issued in 2022 in what was a record breaking year, surpassing the previous highest tally in 2019 by 145,000.

In total 1,080,000 documents were issued by the Passport Office after a period of long delays due to pandemic related backlogs.

The figures were confirmed by the Department of Foreign Affairs yesterday, in an extremely busy year that saw people jump at the opportunity to travel again following the pandemic.

Data provided by the Passport Office showed the year's most popular surname on these passport applications was Murphy.

The most popular baby girls' names were Emily, Fiadh and Lily, while Noah, Jack and James topped the baby boys' list. The oldest applicant was 102 and the youngest just 3 days old.

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The huge demand for passports during the summer led to massive backlogs and at one point in May there were 195,000 applicants waiting for their passport.

In 2019, there were 935,000 passports issued with the number of applications in 2020 and 2021 unsurprisingly dropping to 450,000 and 634,000 respectively.

Out of the total 1.15 million passport applications received this year, 100,000 came from Northern Ireland and Britain.

Aside from the UK, the most online applications came from the USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, France, Spain, Germany and South Africa.

Tánaiste and Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin said: "In 2022, the Passport service saw extraordinary volumes of applications received and passports issued. This was a direct result of pent-up demand due to disruptions to travel throughout 2020 and 2021. The Government made significant investment over the year to scale up services to meet this demand."

According to the department, over 99% of the online renewal applications and paper applications are issued within the standard turnaround time.'