Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I have limited time to contribute. I welcome the many provisions in the Bill that will support the work of An Garda Síochána and the essential duty it performs in this State. We are lucky to live in a democracy where there is policing by consent and the police force is, in general, held in such high regard. It is, of course, imperative that the State provides all the safeguards it can to best protect members of An Garda as they daily place themselves in the line of danger while performing their duties and, therefore, I welcome the many provisions of the Bill in that light. The principle of consent is an important one. It is an aspect of the social contract that co-creates the State among its people and involves a delicate balancing act between rights to individual liberty placed against the constraints the State may place on that liberty for the common good. These choices and how we make them characterise the nature of the State.

I am concerned by the Minister's signalled intention to introduce amendments on Committee Stage to govern the use of facial recognition technology, FRT. That represents a large shift in that balance of freedoms and constraints. It is evident that he believes it is consequential, given that he devoted almost five minutes of his opening remarks to this issue. He outlined many powerful arguments in favour of FRT and they deserve careful consideration but many people, including many of the previous speakers across the House, have raised concerns with regard to civil liberty implications but also the current efficacy and accuracy of the technology. There is a growing body of evidence that FRT can be inherently biased, with divergent error rates across demographic groups having been exposed. The poorest accuracy is consistently found in respect of subjects who are female, black and between 18 and 30 years of age. For example, in the UK more than 1,000 young black men were removed from a so-called gang database when it was uncovered that they had no gang affiliation at all.

I am conscious of moves to legislate on this issue at EU level. The artificial intelligence Act, published by the Commission in 2021, is currently working its way through the legislative process at EU level but is not anticipated to be complete until 2024 at the earliest. With that timeline in mind, it may be more appropriate for us to delay legislating for the use of live searches using FRT in particular until that EU position is finalised.

Given the gravity of this issue, would it not be more appropriate to allow the Bill to progress through the Houses of the Oireachtas without the introduction of FRT amendments on Committee Stage and to then return to the issue through stand-alone legislation that would allow for meaningful public consultation, including a full pre-legislative scrutiny process, on the introduction of FRT to policing in Ireland?

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