Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

There are several areas I want to cover. The first is the IHI and it is like wading through custard talking about it. On the IHI, I agree with Deputy Shortall that we have all come to a conclusion that the direction of the legislation is that the PPSN is the core identifier. Earlier it was said that sometimes PPSNs are wrong or that people might have two of them. Having two unique identifiers will double the possibility that there will be a data error. Identifiers can be wrong too. It was said that various hospitals were, in the past, generating their own IHIs. It seems like a tautology to have two unique identifiers and they are naturally in conflict. I have a couple of questions on this.

The obvious question coming from the consensus at this meeting is whether we are actively looking to phase out the use of IHIs. Are we possibly not doing this because we have commissioned quite a lot of ICT in recent years that relies on IHIs? Is this a fair statement?