Results 2,481-2,500 of 2,990 for speaker:Ossian Smyth

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: I thank the Deputy for the questions. To answer the question about the call centre, this week we have been running an emergency call centre. The contact number is on the cover letter or email that a person gets upon receipt of their digital Covid certificate. That is for emergency problems, rather than asking to be pushed up the list, or for general questions. The call centre is being run...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: They are from two Departments. They are from Revenue and the Department of Social Protection. The service is being provided by the Department of Health-----

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: Exactly. It is run by the Department of Health, but the staff have come from the Department of Social Protection and Revenue for this week.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: Some 1,200 people continued to speak to an operator, rather than give up at the IVR stage.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: I am not sure that I have those stats.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: I take the Senator's point that the earliest point that we engage to get the EU DCC for a passenger the better. I will bear that in mind. That point was made by Deputy Cathal Crowe. The next question was on what we will do about the fewer than 1% of people whose emails have bounced. Our next alternative would be to write to them. If we treat those people as if they had a null email,...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: We tested the EU DCC with names with síntí fada, apostrophes and everything we could think of that might break the system and it worked. I am happy that it is working. However, the data we are supplied with comes from a variety of sources, including from different medical professionals, hospitals, GPs and pharmacies. Sometimes those systems mangle the words so if we are sent data...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: The aim of any IT project is to make it delightful for the user. That is the final goal. A lot of people were delighted when they received their EU DCCs. It is a milestone. They got this thing that states that they are fully vaccinated and that gave them a feeling that they were moving on to the next stage. On the Covid tracker app, we never wanted to force people or make people...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: I am not so sure it is something that we can easily resolve. We have talked through all the different problems that might occur and one of them is where a person's name is different on his or her passport from the name that he or she usually goes on and whether the person can change his or her name. Any type of name change in a system is a security risk because a person may telephone to...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: It is a good question. Within the regulations from the EU, it states that a country can issue vaccination certificates to a resident who was vaccinated in another country if we recognise that country's vaccination system. In the initial roll-out of these vaccination certificates, we are merely sending them to everybody who got vaccinated by the HSE in Ireland. However, we are looking at...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: That is very helpful. I used one last night to put it into my wallet. We are looking at that as well.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: I thank Deputy Lowry for his question. To clarify, we have three that have been accepted in full and a further seven that are partially accepted so far. The Deputy asked how many of those are issuing antigen tests. I would presume all of them, but I will check that with Mr. Lowry in case he knows. It is a process that is being managed by the Department of Health because it is a clinical...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: Deputy Ó Murchú's question is about obtaining a recovery certificate and how you get it. The answer is that you need to contact the call centre. The call centre this week is not capable of issuing the recovery certificates and will not be able to do that until Monday. Even then it will take it up to five days to deliver the certificate. That is the answer at the moment.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: Deputy Ó Murchú is are asking about the verifier app on a phone that can scan a QR code and then come up with the information. The information that shows on screen is the same as the printed information on the sheet of paper. There are no extra data there. They are all encoded in the QR code. The Department of Justice developed this app for its immigration staff, and I believe...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: I will answer that and then I am going to pass over to Mr. Lowry. I understand there are problems using the verifier app. The first is that it only works on the Android operating system, the second is that it is not available in an app store and needs to be side loaded, and the third is that it may not be compliant. It may store data such as sensitive passport data, because it is developed...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: Yes, exactly. We would need a simplified version. But even producing a simplified version and getting it approved in an app store takes a bit of time. I will defer now to Mr. Lowry in case he has any more information on that.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: We have had assistance from NearForm, a Tramore-based company that developed the Covid tracker app. Perhaps Mr. Lowry would again scope out the extent of its involvement. I believe a lot of the work was done in-house by the HSE and by our own Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, but we did get assistance from NearForm.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: The Deputy is exactly right. It is different from the issue of recovery certificates and vaccination certificates, which are centrally done by my Department. Instead, we are allowing the testing service to print or email out a certificate on our behalf, but it needs to connect into our server to generate the QR code. We must check its security infrastructure, clinical capability and...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: Mr. O'Connor has not told me that yet. I have to admit I did not watch all of yesterday's session, but if he says he is looking at a fortnight, then I----

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport: Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (14 Jul 2021)

Ossian Smyth: As far as I am aware, this committee covers cybersecurity so I am happy to answer a side question on this matter. A capacity review was carried out, completed and returned to me. The result of that was that I brought a memorandum to Cabinet to increase the budget and staffing for the National Cyber Security Centre over the coming five years, including the hiring of 20 additional staff...