Mr. Ronan Lupton:

That is fine. My view is that we are currently operating a regime where the telecommunication companies are retaining data under the old legislation. The idea with the general scheme is to build on top of that and triage, effectively, to allow law enforcement to do its job with the various flavours of solutions that have come from the Court of Justice of the European Union.

To the degree that solutions have been set out, Mr. Kelleher said the Department has gone about its job and is trying to faithfully do what is right within the ambit of what the judgment says. However, Mr. Sunderland in his opening statement said there are problems regarding guidance as to how production and preservation orders will work. That is a huge issue. What are the impositions on the rights of the individual citizen in Ireland that may be affected by this that are not, in fact, subject to investigation? That is another issue, which Dr. McIntyre dealt with.

There are, therefore, gaps and it is the speed by which the legislation has come out that caused those gaps. However, I think the filling of those gaps has been dealt with effectively by the submissions before the committee to allow members to scrutinise and report on it. Is it in compliance? I would say we are probably approximately 70% of the way there but there are issues. What I see as being one of the major issues is whether production orders, for example, that are done on an emergency basis can be reviewed ex postby a supervisory authority. Currently, what goes on is not supervised by any individual judge or by any authority. There is simply an application made for disclosure and the industry complies with that. Therefore, that is out of compliance.

The other issue, which I think is important for the Garda, is that the legislation effectively contemplates a cliff. In other words, once this is enacted, we change from 24-month telco retention to 12-month telco retention and there are no transitional measures to say what occurred with data in investigations that might be within the two-year window. That exists in the 2011 framework so that is a problem.

Broadly speaking, we have more homework to do. Is it fully compliant? "No" is the answer. Each of the witnesses has given their ten cent in terms of their area and what is in place. I would say there are gaps, therefore, some of which I identified in the queries section of my first submission. One of the biggest issues regarding the telco gaps, which Assistant Commissioner Kenny identified-----