Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I urge caution. When I was in the Department, I had a number of discussions with civil servants when I found out about these cases to see whether we could establish within the Department a data board consisting for the most part of people external to the Department in order that there could be a constant vigilance as to how protective the Department was. As we all know, there are a number of Departments that hold masses of data: the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, as I have just instanced; the Department of Health, which holds very private data on individuals, families and the general population throughout most of their lives; and the Department of Education and Skills, which also holds a lot of information on people. The Minister's proposal that this governance board be a solo board in the rather rarefied atmosphere of the Department of Finance is not sufficient because when it comes to data protection, there is a factor of simple human curiosity whereby people mean no wrong but nonetheless feel they may be entitled to a peek. Members may remember the case of someone from Limerick winning an enormous prize in one of the lotteries and a departmental staff member who was found to have accessed information on the prizewinner. Whether he or she did, I do not know, because it was a very long time ago, but there is an instinct in people to be a little curious, particularly about people they know, but perhaps also about people in the public media.

My suggestion for the Minister of State's consideration is that the big data-holding Departments, if not every Department, should have a governance board which looks at how the Department handles its data but also underlines to public servants that protecting the privacy of the data is a key objective of each Department. Just passing this over vaguely to some worthy board in the Department of Finance, in my view, as a Minister with a lot of experience in this area, is not sufficient. The Minister of State may say to me that the Secretaries General of the Departments of Health, Finance, Education and Skills and so on will all be on this board. Perhaps they will be, but they are rather busy people and the Government needs to think about the kind of people it wants on the board. I suggest to the Minister of State that the Government needs some very bright, younger IT people - men and women - who will have a knowledge of and a feel for what is likely to be of interest to people who want to snoop. As the Minister of State may be aware, in the Department of Social Protection there were a small but significant number of prosecutions in the courts. The courts arrived in some cases at convictions and passed sentence. It is very important we have a very strict approach.

Another thing I want to ask the Minister of State about is referred to in the background of the Bill. Just as there are Departments that have access to a lot of data about all of us at different times of, or all during, our lives, there are also Departments which hold data about people which they do not allow them to have. This Bill should be an opportunity for the Government to provide a principle that citizens, people who are resident in Ireland, have a right to their own data. We have done this for a long number of decades in colleges and universities and in respect of examination scripts, whether at college or secondary school level. It has been a good system and, it is to be hoped, in the not-too-distant future will be made a better system. I refer in this regard to the Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill.

Unlike other common law countries which have the same legal framework and provide these data access rights for their citizens, citizens here have no such rights. Citizens in Scotland have had these rights for more than 40 years. Citizens in the rest of the United Kingdom have had them for more than 50 years. Citizens in British Columbia and the rest of Canada have had them for about the same period. Citizens in Australia and New Zealand also have the same rights. The Minister needs to be challenged on why the 50,000 or so people in this country who have been adopted have no legal right to information on their adoption.

Worst of all, the body responsible for handling these data is Tusla. We know from the recent report by Mr. Justice Charleton that it is not a perfect organisation. Some very strange stuff was going on with data in it from the information that was before a recent tribunal. It was interesting that a party to the tribunal, Sergeant Maurice McCabe, might not have had any legal right to get his files from Tusla. He had to engage the services of his legal team to do so. We need to look around a few corners and challenge ourselves a little more on how we protect citizens.

To the Minister of State and his officials I say some thought should be given to this issue. From the time of the Adoption Acts in the early 1950s up to when adoption had pretty much died out in the 1980s, other than inter-family adoptions and the adoption of babies overseas, there were about 50,000 adoptions. In the period from the foundation of the State, there were probably about another 50,000 informal adoptions and long-term fosterings. None of the people involved or their descendants has any legal right to his or her data. People adopt all sorts of mechanism to find their data and, in many cases, do find them. As someone who has been through the process, it is all very hush-hush, but guess what? A social worker is also necessary to access data. Can the House believe that?

I will refer to my own case. By the time I had managed to get in contact with the adoption agency that had arranged my adoption, I had been elected to the Dáil, was a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, had lectured in Ireland and Africa and held down jobs. To access my data or even talk about it, however, I had to be assigned a social worker. I am told that is the policy Tusla is also adopting. Can the Minister of State get the Department to change that silly process? I refer to how it approaches the oversight of the release of data to the people who own them. All of us in this Chamber know that there are many children who need a social worker. By and large, unless they ask for a social worker where they believe they need one, people do not need a social worker in accessing their data. Nobody ever suggests a person who goes to the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection to obtain information on his or her pension or other entitlements, should he or she become unemployed, needs a social worker. A person might be very traumatised by the information, but he or she is simply given his or her information and, as far as possible, an explanation for it. In a European context, the Bill is necessary and appropriate, but I am not sure the issue of data protection in Ireland is treated with as much respect as it ought to be. By the way, the penalties should be very severe for civil servants who abuse data protection by taking data to which they are not entitled and examining it. We must show all citizens the highest level of respect in dealing with their personal data.

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