Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Amendment No. 199 is the substantive amendment I seek to make. It is to give effect to the recommendation we made in the pre-legislative scrutiny report to replace the mandatory information session with a requirement that the authority sends a registered post, or other recorded delivery, letter to applicants setting out the relevant information. I apologise because I had to leave in the middle of the debate earlier to go to statements in the Dáil. It was terrible timing. I am sorry I did not hear the full response the Minister gave.

Without labouring the point, as I said we have gone through many different iterations with this legislation as we all know. There have been many different attempts to achieve the balance between constitutional rights of identity and information versus the right to privacy. As I said earlier, things have moved on. The advice of the Attorney General has changed over the years in successive iterations of the Bill. We are at a point where a mandatory information session should no longer be required as a condition of access to identity information, even if that mandatory information session is in much preferable format now to what it was and even if it may be carried out by phone and not by a social worker and all of the welcome improvements that have been made.

The committee, having heard the evidence and having heard from stakeholders, still believed there was a preferable means of achieving the balancing of rights and that this was through a prepaid registered post mechanism. It is an acknowledgement there is some need to balance rights. It is also an acknowledgement that the understanding of privacy and identity and conflicting rights has moved on since we last debated this type of Bill. We should be able to move beyond a mandatory information session in any form. I have tried in one amendment to set out as best I can a way of delivering on the recommendation we made. I know we have had the debate already but I believe this would be preferable to the current mandatory information session.