Mr. Barry Lowry:

I thank the Senator for his questions. I will try to answer them all. First, this at a conceptual stage. As the Senator picked up, it is hard for the public at this moment in time to get an understanding of the benefits of this. However, what members of the public do understand, because they are using the technology, is the concept of downloading a Ryanair or Aer Lingus boarding pass, and putting it on their Apple, Android, or whatever other phone wallet. This is broadly similar to that. In fact, one of the things that the Commission believes is that they have given too much control over this ecosystem to the commercial sector, and not enough control to governments.

I am sure the commercial sector would debate that, but it is certainly one of the things about which people are thinking.

In terms of how one gets benefits out of it, Senator Horkan has given a really good example of how the Commission should be taking this forward, which is the European health insurance card. It would be very easy for people to carry one on a device, like a phone, and simply have fewer things to carry. That is certainly part of it, but also the Commission talks about other things, such as, for example, if you wanted to hire a car in, let us say, France, that you could have your driving licence and insurance documentation on your phone as well. These are documents we carry all the time and we do not have to make a specific point of remembering them because we think we might hire a car for a day while we are on holidays.

In terms of other benefits, Senator Horkan has given a really strong benefit of one of the cross-border dimensions to this, which is opening a bank account. I remember a couple of years ago I was giving a lecture at Trinity College. It was to a master's class in digital marketing. I was asked a question by a young Frenchman who had got a job in Microsoft. He said that when he came over to Ireland, he could not rent an apartment because he did not have a bank account. He could not open a bank account here because he did not have an address in Ireland. That is a case in point whereby his identity could be verified by his own nation, France, and it would make life a lot easier for him. This is the European concept of the free movement of people. Senator Horkan has hit on one of the real potential areas for selling this concept to the public.

The final matter that was raised relates to social media. Of course, this is a completely different debate about whether a government should do this. Senator Horkan's question was whether it would be technically possible. The answer is that it absolutely would be. In fact, one of the things that the President was hinting at in her speech was that often if we go onto a new website it will encourage us to sign up to it using our existing Google, Facebook or Microsoft credentials, if we have those. What they get out of that is they know which websites we are going to and they get a greater understanding about us. The idea is that this European approach would mean that we would control that data and that privacy rather than the commercial entity which is giving us the capability of doing that. We could turn that around the other way and use our European identity to verify ourselves to open social media accounts and so on, but that in itself would require different legislation and a debate about the protection of people online versus the privacy of people who want to go online. I will leave that to experts like Senator Horkan rather than comment on it.