Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent)
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I fully appreciate that the motions allow us to opt in to only certain aspects of the regulation, one which has been passed anyway so there is nothing we can do about it at this stage. Because we are not in Schengen most of it does not apply to us anyway. I do accept that, including the most controversial aspects that we discussed last night, but that does not mean that we have not got an obligation to be critical of those or make points about them. I do want to put them on the record because the interoperability proposals that this committee yellow-carded last October are at the back of this. We sent a reasoned opinion to the Commission on its proposals for the interoperable border and security systems, which is nearly like an EU Stasi at this stage, whereby Big Brother is most definitely watching if one was not born inside the EU. I will not repeat the points but the European Data Protection Commissioner has huge problems with it. What we are doing today is extending the competencies of an existing body. I get that. We are extending it in such a way that it can implement the controversial interoperability proposals that we were unhappy about in October. The concerns about linking migration and terrorism, which is at the heart of this, remain. We need to have a serious discussion on that, why it is happening and how we should respond to it. In the opinion on the interoperability proposals last autumn the European Data Protection Supervisor signalled his concerns about the implications and called for a wider debate. That is the reason we asked for it to be discussed in the House, because there has not been any debate at all on this in the EU or in Ireland. It is creating a mega interoperable database, which is a serious problem that I do not think the citizens of Europe have been consulted on, so we need to have these conversations. I make no apologies that we demanded a discussion on it last night because nothing good can come of this linking of migration and terrorism.

I ask the Minister to be clear in his response. Are we effectively only opting in to the police co-operation aspects of SIS 2? Is that it? If we agree to these motions, are we signing up to any of the other aspects such as VIS, the border aspects of SIS II, EES and ETIAS or do we remain entirely outside of those? They are my two questions.