Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

It emerged yesterday that a laptop containing personal information on over 170,000 people who have donated blood to the Irish Blood Transfusion Service was stolen on a street in New York earlier this month. I have concerns about the security of personal information supplied by people to Government bodies and State agencies. This is not the first time personal information of this nature has been lost. We discovered recently, in response to parliamentary questions tabled by my colleague, Deputy Quinn, that more than 80 laptops, desktops or blackberries have been stolen from, or lost by, Departments over the past five years. There was considerable controversy in the United Kingdom late last year when a computer disk, on which personal information about 25 million people was stored, was lost. At that time, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner stated that there was no guarantee that something similar could not happen here. When people supply personal information to a State agency, it is reasonable for them to have confidence that it will be kept securely. The information supplied to the Irish Blood Transfusion Service can be quite sensitive.

I would like to ask the Taoiseach a couple of questions. What was the extent of the information on the laptop that was stolen in New York? I understand that the Irish Blood Transfusion Service has written to the people concerned. We should be given details about the extent of the information stored on the laptop. Will the Taoiseach ask the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner to undertake a full audit of the security procedures and measures which are in place to govern the protection of personal information that is supplied to Departments? We need to have a full overview of the security in place so that when information is supplied by people to Departments, which they believe is supplied on a confidential basis, it is not open to theft or being accessed by criminals for the purpose of identity theft or even by the staff of the agencies concerned in an unauthorised way.

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