Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

-----absence of this report, this thing would have crept out into other Departments. I take what the Minister is saying about 3.2 million people being happy about the convenience of all of this. However, she is wrong when she says that the purpose of the Government's approach was to allow people to access services more efficiently. The purpose of the Government's approach was to force people to use the PSC to access services to which they would otherwise have been entitled. That is the position. That is precisely the matter on which the Data Protection Commissioner disagrees with the Minister. She said in response to a question asked by Deputy Brady that people who disagree with a legal ruling have the right to appeal. Of course they have. We all know that. As the Minister well knows, it is a gross oversimplification of the position to say that. The Data Protection Commissioner was set up as a statutory body to regulate data and to advise the Government on legislation concerning data, etc. When a statutory body of this nature, having been set up and paid for with millions of euro of taxpayers' money, comes up with a finding that the Minister is unhappy with, it is most unusual for her to rush immediately to her legal adviser. I am not sure whether the advice came from within the Department or from the Attorney General. I am not sure whether the Attorney General agreed with the in-house advice. I do not know where the third-party lawyer came into the picture.

Deputy Brady makes a valid point when he speaks about reputational damage. The Data Protection Commissioner is the European regulator for outfits like Google and Facebook. The Minister was highly condemnatory of the commissioner, a point I will return to in a moment. The impression that this confrontation could create among multinational companies is that if one of them disagrees with a finding of the Data Protection Commissioner, it can go to the Irish Government and the Government will see it right. In 2014, less than €2 million was spent on the Data Protection Commissioner's office. The figure now stands at €15 million, which gives a good impression that we are serious about data protection. However, this controversy is undoing that.

The Minister, in her response to me on a finding of the Data Protection Commissioner, was very condescending. She spoke of compliance with enforcement notices being required within a certain number of days and stated she had not yet received an enforcement notice. She said she would respond to the enforcement notice if it ever arrives. There is no doubt that it will arrive. My understanding was that the Minister was given 60 days to comply with some of the Data Protection Commissioner's requests. As such, it is not unreasonable that she has not yet received enforcement notices.

What is the position? Will the Government legislate in this area? Will it fight the Data Protection Commissioner through the courts? Will it accept, based on the fact that while the public services card is very useful and many people find it convenient and are happy to use it, those who do not want to use it for services other than social welfare should not be forced to do so?