Mr. Simon McGarr:

I am going to pre-empt Dr. Logue because I pressed my unmute button before he did. In order to answer the Deputy's first question, let us imagine there is no attempt at national legislation on this issue and the requests for access to information are addressed solely under the GDPR. The regulation provides for the balancing of rights within its framework. It does not require additional legislation to try to legislate for that balancing. The balancing of rights in inherent to the GDPR. We must recognise which rights are being looked at, which rights are being applied and who has rights. A sequence of questions needs to be asked. One needs to know who is alive and who is dead because there are rights under European law which accrue to people who are alive and are lost when a person dies.

Like Dr. Logue, I have been representing people looking for information about their early lives, as adopted people. One of the more odd things I have encountered in the past couple of months has related to the assertion of the rights of dead people and an attempt to read the fact that people who are deceased no longer have data protection rights in such a way as to assert that records relating to dead people are exempt from GDPR, as opposed to the obvious reading, which is that dead people no longer have GDPR rights. Of course, if the records relating to dead people also relate to people who are still living, those records are still amendable to access under the GDPR. I am confident that the Dr. Logue will also have tales to tell on this front. Unfortunately, we have met what sometimes appear to be misguided and occasionally perverse readings of the GDPR in our attempts to try to access information.

The core of my answer to the Deputy's second question is that I think we have an administrative problem. We have all the legislation that is required but we are lacking the administrative guidance that will see the proper interpretation of the GDPR applied by multiple agencies of the State. It appears that this is a classic case of a need for a ministerial circular. A letter ought to be circulated with a guidance note attached which would have a general scheme that could be used by all parties for describing the application of subject access requests for all the records the different entities hold. Attempting to be granular and saying a certain approach would apply to one kind of record while another approach would apply to a different kind of record, which is the approach in the heads of the Bill, seems to be staring in the wrong place, as Dr. Logue said. We must find the right place to start in principle and, from that, derive a scheme of approach to subject access requests, whether from adopted people or other interested parties. That scheme of access must then be applied across all the organisations involved. Only a ministerial direction note will apply there but it does not require legislation or any additional laws. It is simply a guidance note for good administration.