Mr. John McKeon:

First, we have not dismissed the Data Protection Commission's report out of hand. We considered it very carefully and have invested time and effort in its consideration and obtaining the best advice we can from the Attorney General's office. People should be clear that we did not dismiss the report out of hand. It is not that we decided that we did not like the report and would object to it. If we believed the report and its findings stood on their merits, we would have absolutely accepted them and I would be sitting here telling the committee that we accept them and that this is what we were going to do to deal with it. However, it would be wrong to accept findings that we think are wrong. There is no halo of infallibility on anyone, not on me, the Data Protection Commissioner or anyone else. If we have learned anything from the financial crisis in the period from 2008 to 2012, it is that nobody is infallible, even a regulator. We must respond to the best advice we receive. The advice we have received from the Office of the Attorney General, the senior law officer in the State, is that what we are doing is perfectly in line with the law. As Accounting Officer, I am not going to stop everything I do when the person whose job it is to advise the Government and me tells me that they are the senior law officer in the land and they say I am perfectly entitled to keep doing what I am doing and that we will deal with an enforcement notice should one arise. That is where I am. I am the Accounting Officer and I cannot do anything other than what I am doing. We must be careful about the language used.

The Deputy referred to the public's feeling. Our response to the Data Protection Commissioner, which we have since published, referred to customer satisfaction research on the public services card. The evidence is overwhelming that there is public support for the card. I know that there is media coverage, that there are activist groups and so on that say something different, but if the Deputy was to ask an ordinary person on the street, as we did in independent research, what he or she thought about the card, if he or she was happy with it and the services provided, if he or she felt it was sufficiently transparent, if he or she was satisfied that he or she understood why his or her data were retained, the answers would overwhelmingly be in the affirmative.