Mr. Robert Watt:

I am sorry; I may have misspoke there. I said no system is foolproof. When these issues came to light last year as part of the review, the Department put in extra security features. The acting Secretary General of the Department at the time, Dr. Colm O'Reardon, emailed colleagues reminding them again about data protection issues, about their obligations not to access files unless they need to and about the need to be responsible. Those are guidelines and ways of working that people accept. In Departments, there can be sensitive information and people are very conscious that they should not access information they are not entitled to access, they should not share it etc.

It is a fair point though. There is always a need to review security around data management and that is something that we take seriously. On foot of this, the Data Protection Commissioner is in now doing a review. We are very happy to work with the Data Protection Commission, DPC, on that and look forward to any recommendations the commission has.