Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

We went into full production after a very intense period of organising ourselves, for example, dealing with logistics, equipping our offices and so forth. We have somewhere in the order of 80 to 90 stations where we can capture images for face to face issuance of public service cards. We also have two dedicated public service card centres in Dublin, one in Gandon House and other on North Cumberland Street. To date, we have issued approximately 160,000 public service cards and our target is to issue 600,000 in 2013 and 900,000 in 2014. There are two methods of registering somebody to safe level 2, the level at which a public service card is generated. The first is the face to face method, while the second is a reduced process in which we use information currently held by the State, for example, the Passport Office and prospectively the National Transport Authority in the context of driving licences. If somebody has satisfied the safe protocols by having verified his or her identity and provided an image to the accepted safe level of security required, we will accept this data and, subject to some security questions and so forth, issue a public service card on the back of this. As I stated, the target for this year is 600,000 cards and 900,000 next year. At that stage, we expect to be working on other issues in terms of other uses of the public service card to generate demand for it, for want of a better description. Obviously, the card has a particular use in the context of somebody being a customer of the Department, but it has significant potential to be of use to customers of other agencies and in accessing services provided by other agencies.