Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 23 February 2023
Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement
Engagement with All-Ireland Cancer Research Institute
Ms Eibhl?n Mulroe:
On that point, that is a great question on data protection. It is extremely important in cancer trials. We run cross-Border cancer trials.
One fills out a data protection impact assessment in respect of every trial one does and every site one visits in every country. If the UK changes the situation it is in now, that will have a dramatic effect on our ability to run trials. We are an Irish not-for-profit academic group that sponsors trials in Europe. If the UK changes its position, that will make things hard for us. It will add to the administrative burden and will make it generally more difficult to run global studies when one is dealing with another iteration of data protection, particularly on the island, when we are trying to find ways to harmonise that. It is like what I spoke about earlier with regard to clinical trials. There are a lot of negotiations going on about this. It is really important that we trying to keep as close as possible to GDPR, and let us hope that we all have the same interpretation of it. That is another issue happening in Irish hospitals. I will not go into that today because it is not wholly relevant. The interpretation of GDPR can always cause issues for us in terms of opening our trials, depending on which particular governance institution one is talking to. I am happy to talk about it, but that is more than two minutes.