Dr. Dennis Jennings:

It is irrelevant. However, it is extremely impressive how they have built a scalable system. We need to bring this from the flat manila file and the fingers with rubber caps to thumb through it to the online, accessible web and digital era. It is a huge transformation and therefore we must think not in terms of sharing files but querying distributed files to get the relevant answers. We can get down to categorising in law what queries are allowed so people can write a series of new queries; if they can pull data to answer a query - not keep the data - they can then do some further processing. That is what I would look for with the replacement of this Bill. It would be very empowering but very complex, as one cannot half do it. We cannot do a bit and say it is grand because we have a national individual identifier. We cannot have that unless there are other components, which are trust, security in access and so on.

I do not know how much it would cost but it would probably cost €1 billion. It would cost several billion euro over the next three, four, five or ten years if we do not do it in an incremental, scalable fashion.