Mr. Barry Lowry:

Yes, I wondered if Ms McCabe was going to answer first on the actual legislative piece.

In terms of the technical design, there are a number ways that we can do this. If I can use the recent digital Covid certificate, because obviously we had a couple of good conversations about that at the time, what we did there was we went to the Data Protection Commissioner and set out a potential proposal that basically was built on a privacy first basis. In that solution the data that is made available for the purpose of travel is different from the data that is made available for the purpose of indoor dining, for example, because it is all very privacy-oriented so we could design this in a very similar way.

What will drive this is how the public want to see it developed as well because, in Ireland, we use this concept for digital Government services where it is not just user-centric - in other words, a group of civil servants deciding what is in the users' interest. It is user-driven - in other words, we meet the users, ask them what they want and we let that drive the solution. What we will certainly be presenting in terms of our input into the EU discussions is what the Irish people tell us they want. The features of the contact tracing app were all chosen by the public. That was the way the Irish public wanted the app to be designed so the Irish app differs slightly from other European apps.

I would like to see us develop our own concept of a digital wallet that is driven by the Irish people but meets European standards and guidelines, and then introduce a degree of inter-operability. In other words, if someone chooses to download their driver licence in the future, and their private sector insurance certificate, because they want to hire a car both of those can be read and understood in France, Germany, Spain or wherever they might want to hire a car. I suspect that is the way we will go. As I said in my opening remarks, the discussions on how the technical model will look are only beginning in the next few days so it is very early in this process.