Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

February seems a little bit early for flip-flops but we have another one tonight from our good friends in Fianna Fáil. I am absolutely sickened but not surprised. This follows what bordered on abuse that was meted out to Deputy Jack Chambers the last time around. Having fully engaged in all of the discussions around this issue, he listened to the arguments and convinced his party to vote with us.

In the aftermath he was effectively surrounded by a mob. The position held for the night, but in the intervening period the powers that be have been at work and Fianna Fáil has done yet another flip flop. This is not the first time it has pulled this type of stunt and it is not the first time it will be embarrassed by it either. In June 2017 we received its support at the Select Committee on Justice and Equality for a scheme of mandatory open disclosure in our health services that would have provided that, where serious mistakes were made in hospitals, the person injured as a result would get an explanation as to what had happened and why. The Fianna Fáil Deputies on the committee listened to the arguments and the evidence and accepted that it would make the health service happier and better for all concerned. That was on Committee Stage.

Over the summer, the Government and the Department of Health got to them, and the party machine swung into action so that by Report Stage those Deputies had yet another Damascus-like conversion and decided to vote against us. Of course, six months later the scandal over the failures of open disclosure around the cervical cancer issue broke and mandatory open disclosure then suddenly became the flavour of the month. Everyone wanted it then. The Minister of State was speaking about it earlier; he still wants to bring it in. The point is that we had it then, with Fianna Fáil's support, on Committee Stage, before it rolled over again and voted against us on Report Stage. The Deputies looked pretty ridiculous, yet the same thing is going to happen again.

I want to put this on the record of the House, because I know the way this vote is going to go. Whether it is Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner or a European court, the State coercion that our amendments tried to do away with will not be allowed to stand. We do not want to be like Cassandra, coming into the House to point out obvious problems, but sometimes that is the role that is handed to us. We have to point to the road we are going down.

In the Seanad the Minister of State made a very strange argument. He suggested that our amendments would mean that organisations could not ask for a person's name or address in order to verify one's identity. That is absolute nonsense. The argument is based on the idea that once one's name goes into the public service identity dataset it is no longer one's own. It is supposed that it belongs to the dataset only. This is clearly utter nonsense. The end point of that argument is that the only way for an organisation to get access to one's address is through the public service identity dataset. If that was the case every organisation on earth would have to be signed up to it. They are not signed up to it at the minute, meaning that many organisations are able to verify people's identity without exclusively using the person's public service identity to do so. The Minister of State's argument would make sense if our amendment to section 7 said that a specified body may not make presentation of a public services card or access to any given element of a person's public services identity the exclusive basis by which a person may verify his or her identity in order to conduct a transaction or access a service. It does not say that. It says: "A specified body may not make presentation of a public services card or access to a person's public services identity the exclusive basis by which a person may verify their identity in order to conduct a transaction or access a service." By our amendment I mean the amendment that was accepted in the Dáil and which is now being taken out by the Seanad. We want it to be upheld and re-inserted into the Bill to undo that situation.

A person's public services identity is actually a collection of specific pieces of information held together in a specific database that has particular characteristics. It is something that, when created, may be shared between one public body and another, whether the person involved likes it or not. It is quite a distinct thing, with its own characteristics and functions. It is not just a name and address. Notwithstanding that point, if the Minister of State really had genuine concerns about our amendment, which was adapted by the Dáil, it was entirely open to him to use the huge resources at his disposal in the form of the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel and the Office of the Attorney General to come up with a different wording. If he was worried about the avoidance of any doubt as to what our amendment applied to, there was nothing stopping the Minister of State using those offices, but he did not do that. To me, that shows that the whole argument made in the Seanad was totally disingenuous and redundant.

The issue here is not that the Minister of State is worried that our amendment could have unintended consequences. We should be honest and say that the Minister of State or, no disrespect, the civil servants want to maintain the powerfully coercive elements in the public services card. They want to maintain a situation where people have no choice whatsoever but to get a card and have no choice but to consent to their data being shared around between organisations even if they do not want to or strenuously object. They want to coerce people in this way. It is illegal and the Government will find that out in due course. Fianna Fáil knows that. Vast sums of money have been wasted and more will be wasted clearing up this mess. Despite this, it is really clear that the Government's approach to this issue is exactly the same approach it took to our illegal data retention regime. It will keep operating illegally until a court somewhere stops it. We have done that before in issues such as this, and we are being frog marched into doing exactly the same thing all over again. It is an absolute disgrace, and even at this late hour I would appeal to Fianna Fáil to save itself from further embarrassment.

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