James Bannon (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)

I strongly support this motion, which is driven by the findings of the Comptroller and Auditor General's report on the Government's e-Government strategy, or lack thereof. One only has to mention e-Government for a vision of misgovernment to take over and the overriding picture is one of fiasco and potential fiasco.

As the Government seems to be unable to complete unaided the projects outlined by Deputy Terence Flanagan, it is obviously time to bring in the cavalry. The information society policy unit of the Department of the Taoiseach must consult those with experience in this area to perfect and expand the existing e-Government initiatives.

In the midst of all this bungling, of major concern to me is the issue of security. There are so many institutions with details of our names, dates of birth, addresses, security codes, passwords and medical records that we have become completely vulnerable to identity theft. We could expect a bank which makes a €1.7 billion profit a year to keep its customer details secure but that was not the case, as the Bank of Ireland proved. Therefore, I would not put my money on the Government to protect my vital statistics. I am a betting man and I would not like to bet that the information would be secure with the Government. Its record of mismanagement in this area is a complete disaster.

Card fraud amounted to €14 million last year and apparently the latest form of theft involves distraction techniques. This can be done as simply as a child waving a newspaper in one's face at an ATM machine. One becomes distracted and another child nips in and makes off with a few hundred euro. The same could happen with the Government in a scenario which goes like this: the Government, which has all my details on computer with those of approximately 4 million other people, distracts us and itself with a promise or two, broken later of course, and while no one is looking, all the data disappears. One might say this is a flippant look at a serious situation but it is a valuable lesson nonetheless.

The future lies with e-Government, but security is a basic right of every citizen whose details are entrusted to a Government or non-governmental organisation. Assurances must be given that security will be put in place to protect what will be extensive and highly confidential data and extreme measures must be put in place to honour these assurances.

After the theft of a laptop containing details of Irish blood donors in New York, Deputy Ruairí Quinn asked how many other Government laptops had gone missing. The answer to his question turned out to be 80. This is extremely worrying and I certainly fail to remember news headlines about filing cabinets disappearing from Departments in the days of hard copy information storage. It seems we take one step forward in terms of progress and a number of steps backwards. There is a worrying lack of Government policies relating to security for e-data. With regard to the Irish Blood Transfusion Service laptop the question that must be asked is why was a laptop with details of Irish blood donors taken to New York and treated with such disregard.

We also have the issue of data retention whereby details are stored but nobody knows by whom, where it is kept or, most importantly, who has access to it. While this is permissible under a sequence of data retention legislation, I ask the Minister whether it is morally right.

It is becoming increasingly urgent that we debate in this House the growing availability of electronic systems used to monitor our citizens with regard to data privacy and retention. A series of data losses in the UK have focused attention on the entire area of data protection with the Liberal Democrat health spokesperson stating:

The whole culture of data management in the public sector has to change. Organisations and staff must understand that important data must be protected at all costs.

I certainly endorse that view.

This month, Sweden launched a new citizen-centred e-health strategy designed to ensure the provision of information to support improvements in health care. This e-health strategy will be used to ensure health care professionals can devote more time to patients and adapt health care provisions to individual needs. The strategy calls for tight security on any e-health system. Increased use of e-health will be combined with effective security measures designed to ensure that highly sensitive confidential information relating to individual patients or users is securely handled according to the strategy.

This move is designed to produce a strategy that examines progress in Sweden's health care settings to date and lists six action areas for co-operation and co-ordination at national level, which is extremely important. The first three relate to better conditions for ICT in health care and care of the elderly and the latter are about improving e-health solutions and adapting these to patient needs, which is also important.

Whenever health systems are ranked, in Europe Sweden seems to come out on top or very near the top. We can learn many lessons from the Swedish health care system and its e-Government provisions. At this late stage, after 11 years in power, will the Government take a lesson from what other nations are doing to protect their citizens' data? I would like to hear a response from the Minister on the Swedish system.

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