Mr. Drew Harris:

Facial recognition technology is not what we are seeking. We are seeking facial identification and the point of that is that we will have thousands of hours of CCTV and use AI to go through and find every incidence where we have the record of an individual who is present. We have no database of pictures to run them against so the object for us is to see what offences have been identified and make efforts then to identify that individual through normal police work. The AI assists us to the point of establishing the number of times an individual is seen and that individual may be engaging in criminal activity. It is just so much faster. It is months and months faster than individual gardaí sitting in front of laptops going through thousands of hours of CCTV.

I refer to all the fears set out around facial recognition technology. We do not even wish to push as far as the European directive on AI. What we wish to do is retrospective investigation of serious criminality where CCTV or other images might play a part. Therefore, there has been a huge distortion in this. In doing so, the importance of its use in the expeditious of investigation and bringing serious offenders to justice has been lost to our detriment. As we sit here today, we have lost a very valuable investigative tool and I know the Government is working hard to make sure we have that as soon as possible.