Mr. Peter Lennon:

Absolutely. As a further safeguard, we have stressed the point that access to information held by the NHIA will be anonymised and that we will be creating a criminal offence of attempting to re-identify an individual from that information. These are important measures from the point of view of public confidence.

The Deputy is correct in that the authority will not impact adversely on any information that is in the system. It should serve to increase the information that is available to answer parliamentary questions.