Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Processing of or in relation to data, including personal data, means an operation or a set of operations that are performed on the data or set of data whether by automated means or not. It is the collection, recording, organisation, structuring and storage of the data. It also means altering the data so if somebody has, for example, three minutes of footage, he or she may want to reduce it to ten seconds for use as evidence. It covers retrieval and consultation. This needs to apply to each section of the Bill.

It is a technicality; it is implied. By putting it in each section, we are ensuring that there will be no ambiguity and that the processing must apply to every element of the gathering of data.