Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

To be clear, the guardrails are set out in section 12 of the Bill. It is important to say we are very respectful and concerned about individuals and their privacy. There are a couple of elements to that. One is that we need them to be in the electronic health system so they can get the quickest possible and the best, most integrated care. If you turn up to a hospital with a major trauma and have a complex medical background, you need the people who are caring for you to be able to access your complete information. Nevertheless, you are also entitled to the protection of your data, how that is managed, how it is shared and who can access it.

Part of our responsibility is the security side of this. We are quite aware of the scale of the cybersecurity attack on the health system that happened. That it happened during Covid, I always felt, somewhat masked the seriousness of it because there was so much disruption in the health system as a consequence of Covid. When the cybersecurity attack then happened at the same time, very significant disruption occurred as a consequence. I often felt people did not really attribute the disruption to the scale of the attack that happened here. We are very conscious of that in how we approach this. This is a live concern, not just for the Irish system, the current system or the future system but right across the EU. We hear of increasing concerns, especially in the eastern part of Europe, about how health systems are managed. We are very aware of that and we are taking every possible step we can on that side of things. There is a balance here. The individual is protected and respected in every possible way. We have set out the guardrails and the way in which that can be done, in section 12 in particular. Then there is a very different perspective in respect of hospitals more generally. They are funded by the State, they participate and that is it.