Mr. Barry Lowry:

An EU health grouping was set up specifically to look at the digital Covid certificate and Ireland was represented on the grouping. We have been involved all the way through in getting early prototypes of the design of the certificate and, as Mr. O'Connor said earlier, making sure that our certificate met the EU standard. The other big area of involvement is what is called the interoperability gateway. What happens is that we download the latest public keys every six hours from the other states. That enables us to read the QR code of another state. Every time someone in the BMU or in An Garda Síochána switches on the app he or she downloads the newest version of the public keys, which means that if a certificate from another country cannot be read, it is an issue with the certificate not with the Irish verification process.