Ms Helen Dixon:

To respond briefly, we have made a detailed submission to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform via the Department of Justice and Equality for budget 2020. We believe we need to keep increasing our resources. The increases we have made to date have reflected and absorbed the capacity reality and the reality of limitations of the recruitment process through the Public Appointments Service. We have grown as quickly as we can and have been allocated a budget to do so but that cannot stop now because, as the Deputy correctly stated, the scale of the work we have to do is only going to increase.

There are a number of provisions in the GDPR that should assist us in terms of the scale of the work we have to do. Accountability is required on the part of all organisations and accountability of those organisations directly to the public. Data protection officers have now been appointed in 1,200 organisations in Ireland. These should be assisting in raising the standards of data protection in those organisations.

There are many other areas of the GDPR, such as codes of conduct and joint operations, that remain to be fully unlocked and which will also drive compliance. We will always have to take a risk-based approach and at the moment there are risks across a very significant number of areas that we are looking at.