Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent)
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I thank Mr. Deering. I would like to speak to a number of the cross-cutting areas and then I will finish with a number of specific issues I hope Mr. Deering might consider. I am sure there are many issues coming his way. A concern I have heard a lot from very different areas and places is in regard to the information component of Mr. Deering's role, including that in the move to gov.iea lot of information has been vanishing. In parallel with some Departments moving over to gov.ie, sources of information, documents, explainers and so on that were previously available are vanishing such that people, in particular civil society, and individuals are finding it much harder to source documents. They are getting only an oversimplified summary. Finding out where something is coming from, the policy on it, what it tracks back to or the meeting where this or that happened is becoming harder. This relates to a general issue around the digitalisation of the archiving as a public information source and right in terms of accountability of Government and departmental information. That is a cross-cutting piece, but a really serious concern. I hope Mr. Deering can address it.

Related to that, I want to highlight another issue. We have talked about hoping to move past the point of always having to use freedom of information. FOI will always be needed, but we might not need it as much. Another area where people are having to use a long, cumbersome process, unnecessarily, is in regard to data subject access requests. This is about the difficulties that people are facing in accessing their own information. I will not go into the detail of GDPR. I am aware of the existence of the Data Protection Commissioner. Data subject access requests are tools under that data protection process. It strikes me that in respect of a lot of those issues, there is a pattern of people having to use this methodology to access this information they should be able to freely access on request and, as such, not overburden the Data Protection Commission, which we know is under pressure at EU level. That strikes me as another area of concern. There are two areas where I can see that as being very relevant, that is, in the engagement with Tusla in regard to the 1989 directives that are superseded by GDPR and in regard to the autism files in respect of families with autism that were held in the HSE. That damaged a lot of trust.

I ask Mr. Deering to address those two cross-cutting issues and then I will come to my final questions.