Mr. Finbarr Heslin:

When the regulations were published in 2015, it was decided that there would be a non-ministerial database, primarily because there were an awful lot of data already on databases and there would have been a complication in moving those data onto a ministerial database. It would have been incredibly difficult under GDPR to contact those people and we may not have been able to do it. A set of incredibly extensive criteria was printed by the Department and if a database adhered to those conditions, it was approved. Historically, the Irish Greyhound Board and the Irish Kennel Club would have stored data and then there would have been two independent databases, which have been in existence for 20 years. We were the ones who knew how to store data associated with microchips. The centralised database is a slight red herring insofar as we do not need a centralised database; we just need systems to talk to each other. That is what API platforms are. If the Minister decided there was a requirement for a centralised portal, we would not need to reinvent the wheel. We would just need those four databases to talk to each other and that is incredibly easy and basic now with API systems.