Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 13 February 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality

General Scheme of the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill: Discussion

Mr. Drew Harris:

We are in something of a legislative lacuna here, in that there is no Bill providing clarity around what exactly we can do. At the moment, we are seeking legal advice about what we can do with all this footage within the present legal framework. There are individuals whose faces we cannot see but who are wearing distinctive clothing or have distinctive characteristics. We are seeking advice about using digital methods to pursue them, tag them, in effect, and follow their movements until we get to a position where we have an image that identifies them. We are doing that manually but if we were able to apply software to look for specific characteristics of a person's clothing or whatever it might be, it would speed up the process around certain of these issues.

A lot of this is a manual process because it is about reporting for an evidential purpose. Once someone has-----

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