Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

There are many positive things in the Bill. The use of body cameras will be a very important improvement for An Garda Síochána in terms of its members' safety and the safety of the community. These represent a technological advance that we should welcome.

I spend a lot of time talking about parking in bus lanes. Automatic number plate recognition is essential to combating that. This is an issue I have brought to the Joint Committee on Transport and Communications and the Minister always tells me it is an issue for the Minister for Justice. Therefore I am delighted to see some use of automatic number plate recognition.

Any time we give new powers to the Garda, we must be sensitive, have a debate and ensure there are checks and balances so that the powers we give strike the right balance between the right of the community at large to be safe and the rights of the individual citizen. In that regard, I will raise some things in the Bill but I will start by raising something that is not in the Bill. I will start where Deputy O’Callaghan ended, namely with facial recognition technology aspects which were spoken about. I am gravely concerned because facial recognition technology does not work. It is filled with race, age and gender biases. If we are introducing facial recognition technology with the hope of streamlining Garda work and making it easier for gardaí to catch and prosecute criminals, then swamping them with a load of false negatives of innocent people who have been caught up in the dragnet of facial recognition technology or mass surveillance will just overwhelm our already overburdened courts and our already overburdened gardaí. Facial recognition technology does not work and in its current form is likely to make things worse. Even if it does work, and it does not, there are challenges because it opens a door to mass surveillance. The question must be asked whether the introduction of facial recognition technology would be in line with the fundamental freedoms of the EU citizen that the European Union promises.

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