Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The PPS number has been in existence for a long time. It is one of the factors that enables much better delivery of public services among the wide range of services I mentioned earlier. It is governed by extremely tight data protection regulations and it is a criminal offence to misuse PPS numbers. I appreciate the concerns people have expressed on this issue but in the case of Irish Water it is in order to provide access to allowances. One of the concerns that have been mentioned has been in respect of children's PPS numbers. However, there are only two items of information that could be sought by Irish Water in that respect or only two questions that can be asked. One is whether it is a real and valid PPS number.

The second question is whether the person to whom the PPS number is assigned is aged under 18 years. Apart from answering these two questions and contrary to what people appear to believe, no other data exchange is involved. The data are confined.

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