Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

I mentioned this at the outset. Essentially we are trying to provide for a streamlining of administrative functions between HRI and the racing regulatory body. That may involve the amalgamation of two data bases, which in large part contain the same information about the same client base. There will be a need to share this information. There are two possibilities and I am not qualified to explain the detail of this.

One possibility is that the data could be shared entirely within the provisions of the current data protection legislation. If that is the case, we do not need a provision in the legislation. What we have done is to make a provision for possible need for legislation to facilitate streamlining and used square brackets to indicate this. If it is the case that in order to do what we want to do, we need to make some minor adjustment to the data protection provisions, then we will need some explicit provision in the legislation. We will take the guidance of the Office of the Attorney General on this. If the Office of the Attorney General states that we need to include some provision, then we will be guided by her and the drafting will be guided by her. What we have included, is not necessarily a reflection of what might end up in the Bill but we want to include it to signal the possibility that it would happen.