Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have two other questions that I will put quickly. We hope there will be a continued smooth transition and that effectively we have the same data protection and data privacy regimes in the EU and the UK. I know some of this is political, but views have been expressed by the British Prime Minister and some of his advisers that they want to move away from GDPR. We saw that the US had concerns about the privacy shield for reasons of surveillance purposes, cybersecurity and counterterrorism. What would be the implications if the UK adopted a similar type approach to the privacy shield as the US and decided to introduce measures that would effectively amount to surveillance of data? What should we do here to prepare for that?

My final question relates to a concern I have expressed publicly. Given the scale of the work the Data Protection Commission has on a variety of issues and the ever-growing demands on it, do the witnesses believe the DPC is sufficiently resourced to be able to address the potential range of concerns that could arise as a result of the adequacy decisions not being adopted or if we start to see the data protection regimes between the EU and the UK diverge?

I again thank the witnesses for their presentation.