Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy is asking, in effect, that individuals sign up to it. Let us say an individual is applying for a SUSI grant. The application could contain an element related to the Departments of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and Agriculture, Food and the Marine and an element related to the Revenue Commissioners. On the basis of what Deputy Wallace is suggesting, that individual might have to carry around all of those elements. I am not knocking the proposal for the sake of it because this is something that we discussed at length in the Seanad. We will have people in a bureaucratic swamp if we go down that road and we will undermine the principle of what we are trying to achieve here, which is to make legal the sharing of data between body A and body B. Everyone accepts that the situation that currently pertains is not acceptable but with this provision, we would end up putting people in a very difficult and ambiguous position. Pensioners in the public sector would be in a very difficult situation and I do not think anybody wants that. There are 320,000 people in receipt of various public sector pensions. The net result of the Deputy's amendment would be to place them in a very difficult legal position.