Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 13 July 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Discussion

Mr. Barry Lowry:

No. I should emphasise that we built the Covid tracker application to be a decentralised solution. The Government does not know what someone is doing with his or her certificate. As Ms Canavan said earlier, downloading a certificate to the Covid tracker application is just a matter of convenience. We all know that people will download their boarding passes onto their phones, for example. It is something that people like to do. When they choose to do that, Government does not know that they have done it and it does not track what airports they have used it at or anything else. It is entirely decentralised. As Ms Canavan said earlier, it is entirely by choice. One does not have to switch on all the elements in the application to use the certificate. If one only wants to use that part, that is fine.