Mr. Barry Lowry:

They would be addressed by Departments and obviously such complaints are referred to the Data Protection Commissioner. I guess the answer is "too many" because any complaints at all are too many. That said, as a percentage of the number of transactions, the number of complaints would be relatively low. In terms of the Senator's previous point, one must consider the investment that the State has made in setting up the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. Government has also set up a cross-departmental body chaired by the Minister of State, Deputy Dara Murphy, which has been tasked with trying to accelerate good data protection at departmental level and across all organisations in the State.

One must also consider the investment the State has made in the public service card and the MyGovID initiative, which was launched by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Donohoe, and the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Varadkar, a month ago. The key principle behind this is that the worst possible scenario would be if I asked for data about me but was given data about somebody else. The whole robustness behind MyGovID, the public service card and the SAFE process is to absolutely provide assurance to citizens that their data will not be erroneously provided to someone else who has similar data but not a full data match. Huge investment is being made by all Departments and across Government to try to not only provide these assurances, but to also provide robust audit processes so that we know that we are doing the best that we can and are checking constantly that we are getting the positive outcomes from that work.