Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

In respect of the PPS number, Senator Keane mentioned the register of births, marriages and deaths. There is already an automated system based on the PPS number whereby deaths notified to the registrar feed automatically into the system in the Department of Social Protection and payments are stopped fairly quickly. The HSE uses that information as well. More than 30 services take the information and automatically feed it in using data matching techniques but one must have a unique identifier that can link the two databases. There is clearly a consensus here that as a control mechanism, it is certainly a way forward. Talking to the Department about the public services identity card may be worthwhile for this committee's deliberations.