Mr. Simon McGarr:

If I might follow up on the question of the urgency. There is no one in the country who would not recognise the value of being able to find a lost person, missing person, a person at risk by way of an inquiry from cellphone masts, etc. It should be recognised that the data retention scheme is intended to retain data beyond the point that it would normally be retained by telecommunications providers. After all, they do retain this data for up to six months for operational purposes. It is simply to give a legislative basis beyond that point. As a result, there would be very few missing persons cases, for example, where a child goes missing, where it would be necessary to rely upon retention of data legislation to access that data. The person would have to have been missing for up to six months before the access was sought under this legislation. While the Garda may have given the Department some figures in respect of the purposes for urgent requests I am not sure those urgent requests are made for data that would be retained anyway in respect of people's locations and which did not require the implementation of the retention of data regime.