Mr. Muiris O'Connor:

I can take the questions about the app. I can confirm that development of the app is complete and in a technical sense, it is ready to be deployed. The purpose of the app is to enable the health service to improve the speed and effectiveness of contact tracing. It has three basic functions: the contact tracing, a symptom tracker and a trusted source of information relating to Covid-19. It will add value by identifying more contacts than is possible in a manual tracing process. This particularly applies to strangers who might become close contacts, and those cases will increase as we return to normality and lift restrictions.

The issue of timing has featured during the debate. The app provides a capability to provide rapid notification to all close contacts who are app users within three hours. That is a very significant gain on the alert and the guidance that will apply. The app will be free to all citizens. It is a population health initiative and we want all citizens to engage with it. In that context, we have arrangements in place to have English and Irish versions and we have worked with the National Council for the Blind of Ireland, NCBI, to ensure full accessibility.

The app has two critical success factors as we assess it. The obvious one is population take-up. The other one is interface with the testing and tracing services. On the interface with those services, I assure the committee that enormous work has been done to plug it in properly into the wider testing and tracing operation. The issue of population take-up brings us to the GDPR issues and the assurances people can have about their privacy being managed in how the app is designed. We have taken enormous care to ensure maximum privacy. The development of the app over the past 12 weeks or so has been a journey towards the maximisation of privacy. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties and others have contributed substantially in setting out key principles that must be observed, and we are confident that we have observed those principles.

The app is voluntary. It operates a decentralised architecture that avoids any data being held centrally by the health services or the Government. Additional data of statistical value is provided by users on the basis of user preference. All the details about the data and the privacy considerations are set out in a detailed data protection impact assessment, DPIA, document. We completed that a number of weeks ago and it has been considered in great detail by the Data Protection Commissioner, who has responded. The Minister committed in the Dáil and the HSE committed in statements in recent weeks to making these publicly available and it is our intention to do that tomorrow morning. That will be good in terms of transparency and it will set the ground-----