Mr. Muiris O'Connor:

Yes, we are very comfortable with and excited about the adoption of PPSNs and eircodes into the health and social care services. The vaccine roll-out was a concrete demonstration of the Irish public's comfort with supplying PPSNs. It is a number people know, and I think that when it came to their being assured that the health system knew who they were, knew their previous set of vaccinations and so forth, there was broad comfort. There were no issues surfacing and no discomfort conveyed to us from our public consultations or from any of the engagements. There is a sense, I think, that this is the right move and will allow for a much more coherent approach.

The individual health identifier was adopted in the Department of Health under 2014 legislation. Deputy Durkan is right that within that legislation, as well as date of birth, surname and forename, PPSN was one of a set of keys that the health system was allowed to collect in the development of the IHI. All that work done over recent years stands to us still because, in general, the HSE will know the PPSN where it has an IHI, so it will make the linkage of health records across different service providers much easier. We are very confident about-----