Mr. Andrew O'Sullivan:

It is accepted best practice that the best results are obtained where there is a true digital approach to the processing, with a trained facial examiner working in conjunction with the technology. If someone is sitting in front of a screen for eight hours, there is a chance that he or she will get tired or develop tunnel vision and start to make mistakes. A machine does not get tired. It is a question of the two working in conjunction.

This is complicated from a technical perspective, so I can give another example of where we apply digital techniques. It is exactly the same approach, but it is perhaps an easier one to explain. The Senator may have seen from press coverage last September or thereabouts that we now have access to a list of uninsured vehicles from the Motor Insurers Bureau of Ireland. That is known to contain inaccuracies. It is highly accurate for private vehicles, but it is not particularly accurate yet for fleet vehicles. It will be once fleet managers provide information on which vehicles are covered by their policies. We had deployed the technology to just 150 gardaí, but we deployed it to all 700 members of our roads policing units last week. In the next month or so, we will deploy it to all gardaí through their mobile phone apps. In practice, this means that, if gardaí get a flag from the app or the in-car ANPR about a vehicle being uninsured, they will stop it. That will be at a checkpoint or, in some cases, on the open road, but they make no assumptions. All they have is an indication that an offence may have been committed under the Road Traffic Acts. They will not take the car off the road or even accuse the person of having no insurance. It is an opportunity to have a discussion and use other information at their disposal, including discussing it with the motorist, who may be able to produce an insurance certificate. Of course, that certificate may not be correct, so the gardaí can ring the insurance company. There are other steps they can take to verify it.

The exact same digitalisation approach applies when we process facial images. The machine will give an indication that it perhaps has found a match, but it is up to the facial examiner to prove and stand over that in court. There were 174 detections last year for child pornography. All of those used biometric techniques. In the seven years we have been doing this, using the same techniques with progressively more reliable technology, we have never had a single instance of it being successfully challenged in court. The only thing that the court is interested in is the identification that was carried out by the Garda member. That is the best that I can say about accuracy.