Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael)

The Minister is sympathetic to the thinking behind this amendment which I assume is to provide for better authentication of the identity of persons for electoral register and voting purposes. It would be premature at this stage to extend the use of PPS numbers to this area without first examining the range of important issues involved. Given the range of privacy and data protection issues to be considered before a public sector body or agency can be permitted to use PPS numbers for the purpose of transacting with customers, that body or agency must first be statutorily authorised to do so. That statutory authority is given by amending Schedule 5 to the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005 so as to add to the list of specified bodies. As part of the process of giving that statutory authority, the body or agency in question must first submit a business case to the Minister's Department. In deciding the merits of the case, the Minister will then consult with other interested parties, including in particular, the Data Protection Commissioner and legal advice would also be sought where appropriate. A number of significant privacy and data protection issues could arise if PPS numbers were to be used for electoral purposes. In particular, such data must not form part of the published electoral registers. The data protection and other privacy implications of the proposal need to be examined carefully by the Department, the Data Protection Commissioner and any other interested parties. Very recently the Department received correspondence from the Local Government Management Agency in respect of an electoral register improvement project, an overall project to improve the standard of the electoral register and that matter is being currently examined by the Department and a response will issue in due course. On that basis the Minister does not propose to accept the amendment.

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