Mr. Denis Kelleher:

I do not. There is a whole issue around the running of information systems across the State. If we were to have an identification system then the most efficient way to run that and to lower the cost would be to pool all of the data into one giant database. We would then get into other data protection concerns, of course. This is not a risk-free outcome either. We have to compare it to the alternative, however, which would be a private sector monopoly on the provision of these services. The reason the GDPR is so blasé about the need to identify someone as either an adult or a child is because most other European member states do this as a matter of course. As members know, people living on the Continent must have their ID cards on them at all times.

If a policeman asks a person to identify himself or herself, he or she has to produce ID. If the person does not, the policeman can arrest him or her, bring him or her to the police station and hold him or her there until he or she identifies himself or herself. For historic reasons, they have a quite different regime from ours. It is a very significant policy change for us to say that the State would be in a position to definitively identify all its citizens. The problem is that is happening anyway. Everyone in this room, I assume, has a mobile phone. We all are effectively identified by that anyway. It is quite easy to track our movements across Dublin at any stage through our mobile phones and then to track our conversations, etc. Effectively, we are being identified anyway. We are being identified through our faces. If a person walks through the streets of London, they have facial recognition technology which will track him or her from one point to another. The question is who is going to do this identification. Is it going to be the State or is it going to be the private sector? Is it going to be the market providing the solution or will it be the State? It is a significant question. It is a question that the GDPR was going to force us to answer, one way or another. If we do not answer, it will just default to the social media companies.