Mr. Fintan Towey:

Overall, we are trying to ensure that we have a system that works and provides appropriate levels of safeguard. If we wanted to devise, in legislation, an offence provision in relation to the role of carriers, it would bring us into a lot of legal difficulty in seeking to identify exactly what the requirements would be and what a defence might be for carriers. It would also open up the issue of what kind of data retention carriers might need to engage in in order to defend their position in terms of checks they might have carried out on any individual passenger. That opens up complexity around data retention and all of the data protected complications that go with that.