O’No! People with apostrophes in surnames facing passport application issues
Darragh Mc Donagh
The Department of Foreign Affairs is working with tech companies to resolve an issue preventing people with apostrophes in their surnames from applying for passports.
The Passport Service was recently made aware that some applicants were encountering difficulties when applying for travel documents online, whereby apostrophes were not recognised as valid symbols.
This left individuals with surnames such as O’Connor, O’Sullivan, or D’arcy unable to proceed with applications using their legal names.
Following an investigation into the issue, the Passport Service established that the problem was occurring only for applicants using Apple’s iOS operating system on devices such as the iPhone and iPad.
The ‘smart punctuation’ feature on these devices renders apostrophes unrecognisable to the Passport Service’s application portal, according to Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Harris.
“The Passport Service is aware that some applicants have experienced difficulty entering an apostrophe on the Passport Online application form,” he said in response to a parliamentary question from Green Party TD Roderic O’Gorman.
“Following an investigation, it appears that this issue only occurs when using an iOS device where the ‘smart punctuation’ feature is enabled.”
Mr Harris said the Passport Service was working with external partners to resolve the issue but advised applicants with iOS devices to make applications on a PC, laptop or Android device instead.
Alternatively, the ‘smart punctuation’ feature can be disabled on iPads and iPhones, which should allow them to fill out the form correctly without triggering the “invalid character” error notification.
Problems encountered by people with apostrophes in their surnames inspired a small group of Irish-Americans to establish an advocacy group in 2017 called ‘Keep the Apostrophe in Irish Names’.
The group said it was “fed up” of being forced to spell their surnames incorrectly in order to get computer systems to recognise them.
The problem has even resulted in some people encountering issues at airport security when apostrophes are not recognised by airlines’ computer systems, and passengers’ surnames therefore appear different on their travel documents.
