Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will speak very briefly. The Minister of State has repeated the point that he is not prescribing what the individual service provider must or must not use. We fully and totally accept that. Neither are we. There is no contradiction there whatsoever. We fully accept that service providers can ask for any method of verification as they see fit. All we are saying here is that the public service provider cannot make the public services card the only way to verify identity. That is it. If loads of people want to use it, as I am sure they will, happy days. That is up to them. Equally, if they do not want to use it they must have the right to produce an alternative method of verification. We are talking about allowing their data to be processed and kept in a centralised registry where it can be shared with up to 150 specified bodies. A lot of people have a problem with that. They are probably a minority. They are probably a substantial minority, but a minority nonetheless. However, they are a minority whose views and position are supported by the European Convention on Human Rights, ECHR, and the general data protection regulation, GDPR.

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