Mr. Peter Lennon:

I will follow up on Mr. O'Connor's comments. If one looks back to 2005, 2006 and 2007, one would be forgiven for believing we were standing at the dawn of a new digital age where everybody would have a cradle to grave national electronic health record. Some countries spent a great deal of money trying to make that happen.

In 2009-10 there was a subtle change as people realised that was not as feasible as they might have wanted it to be. We now have systems that talk to each other such that rather than a big bang what we have is an evolving system.

Reference was made to the number of legacy systems in the HSE. As stated by Mr. O'Connor, it is important we learn from the mistakes of others. Often, it is good not to be first to do something because one then gets an opportunity to see what does not work. We have looked at the landscape not only in Europe but in North America, Canada, Australia and so on. The evolutionary approach is the one that has been adopted in the Bill. Mr. O'Connor referenced inoperability in relation to Head 11 of the Bill. This is about computers communicating with each other. In this regard, we are suggesting a standard based system such that there will be clarity for everybody going forward as to how the bits of the puzzle will fit together. One of the advantages of being where we are now is that other people rather than us have spent billions of euro and made the mistakes which, hopefully, we will learn from. I hope my response on this matter has been helpful.

On the due diligence issue, everybody here probably attends a general practitioner, GP. When we visit our GP we tell him or her things we would not tell anybody else because that relationship is governed by confidentiality. The information in the records about which we are speaking is personal information. Under the data protection Acts, the directive or the forthcoming regulation that information is regarded as sensitive, personal information that deserves the highest degree of protection. The sale of a business which holds information on people's personal health is rather different to the sale of most other types of businesses. To say to somebody who is interested in buying that business that he or she would have a right to examine the records in order to establish whether the client base in those records was such as to justify a particular price is inconsistent with the principle of data protection. What we are doing in terms of this Bill is building on data protection concepts. I do not think it is possible to allow a situation whereby a person who is thinking of a buying a business could be permitted to examine records in order to establish a monetary value on what those records suggest the business is worth.