Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I share the Tánaiste's concern about the conduct of those credit unions. I congratulate the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner on this successful prosecution. I was interested to hear the Tánaiste's reply. Essentially, credit unions that had access to PPS numbers rang the Department, pretended to be representing another State body and sought the addresses of people they were chasing for alleged bad debts. Does the Tánaiste agree that this perfectly illustrates the danger of making people's PPS numbers available to third parties like Irish Water? As soon as a PPS number is given to a third party, the potential exists for anybody and everybody ultimately to access it. People who have no business accessing PPS numbers should not be able to access them. What steps have been taken to avoid a recurrence of this in the future? Somebody who is equally adept at duping social welfare officials might make a telephone call in the morning claiming to be from the southern area health board and looking for information like this. What has been done to prevent that from happening?

See this speech in context