Lynn Ruane (Independent)

I thank the witnesses for the presentations and information so far. My question intersects the discussions on human rights impact assessments and on procurement. I hope procurement acts as a barrier to bad practice in terms of what could and could not be introduced.

I read an article in The Guardiana couple of weeks ago about ministers in the Labour government in the UK meeting with Google, Palantir, Amazon and Microsoft to create what they called a "prison outside a prison". It was quite concerning because it looked for tech responses to the prison system. Going beyond the conversations about ankle tagging that have been ongoing for years, they actually suggested putting things under people's skin and using robots for prison management. Looking at those conversations across the water, I hope the EU AI Act might protect us from bonkers stuff like that but it is a concern. It is that kind of stuff that concerns me when we look at some of the most marginalised communities and the resources they may have to be able to push back against such awful proposals.

That brings me to my next question, which concerns the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, with which we will, hopefully, have a discussion at some stage. It concerns a chatbot called Tara that is used by the Department. I saw in a reply to a freedom of information request on the small business innovation research programme, SBIR, which was co-funded by the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer and Enterprise Ireland, that it developed the Tara chatbot. This is now being used by the Department of justice. The chatbot was termed a pre-commercial initiative so it was probably not fully tested. I do not know what is involved in it. Hopefully, Mr. Lowry can speak more to that. This chatbot was taken by the Department of justice. Did the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation have a procurement process with regard to the Department of justice using that chatbot? Was it decided that there would be no tender process for that because that is the type of thing that would concern me? I would be concerned that something that was used elsewhere is transferred to another Department without having gone through a procurement process or any of the same kinds of processes that it should go through with regard to a Department using something that another Department has tried out in a pre-commercial stage.