Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

That is the answer. I was a bit scared about some of the points made about the public services card, PSC, investigation and found the responses to Deputy Wallace's questions a little bit chilling. The commission has been investigating this since 2017. The witnesses have said that things have moved on and the issues relating to driver's licences and so on have been sorted. In fairness, the commission identified, well over a year ago, the illegal basis upon which the Department was operating the PSC. We know, as a result of the dialogue in society, a number of changes have come about, but those are not as good as they should be. Let us be clear that the Attorney General gave a legal opinion which, this time last year, led to the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport telling the Road Safety Authority, RSA, not to rely on the PSC for driver's licences but it still kept doing it for another five months, in flagrant breach of that ministerial instruction.

The Data Protection Commissioner said this was a pressing matter which needed urgent attention in August 2017. Our systems needed to be sorted at that stage. Here we are in April 2019, and it has not been concluded. I do not get that. I note the exchange the witnesses had with Deputy Wallace about the full report and I am not entirely clear on that. I am not clear why it has been delayed. The Department gave the commission 470 pages that have to be analysed. That seems like a general sort of Civil Service approach to inquiries - dump a pile of information late in the day and bog people down in that sort of stuff. That said, 470 pages is not an enormous amount, given the time this investigation has been going on. When can we expect it to be concluded? I know the witnesses said the commission does not have the expressed powers to publish but do they think there is a legal impediment to publishing, or did I understand the witnesses correctly in replying to Deputy Wallace that the commission would have to get the permission of the Department to publish the final report? I was not fully sure on that point.