Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I wish to share my time with Senator Norris. I am pleased to see the Minister in the House. I welcome the Bill because it is a decisive step to take us into the 21st century. I received a telephone call this morning from an Irish friend who happens to be in Australia. He wanted to compliment me on the words I used in the Seanad debate last night. I was very impressed because, even though he lives inMelbourne, he had already read The Irish Times and the report of the Seanad debate. It is a reminder of how technology has changed and how we have not necessarily used it.

I welcome the Bill because it will make information much more accessible to citizens, particularly in regard to Government matters. On the face of it, keeping a land registry should be as simple as it is necessary. Given the importance of property and land in this country, this is something which has been made very difficult over the years, which is understandable. It has been difficult because it is paper based. Being able to move from a paper-based system to a new system is ideal.

When I was 17 or 18 years of age my parents moved house and my father decided that I should own the house because I could get a lower mortgage rate than he could. When my parents died in the 1970s — I had never lived in the house — I sold the house. However, when the house was resold a couple of years ago, the new purchasers discovered that I had not obtained my wife's permission to sell the house. It was a house in which we never lived ourselves.

Senator Mansergh referred to costly lawyers. It seems to be very difficult to transfer property unless one uses technology or very expensive methods. On that basis, what the Minister has done and what he is promising to do on Committee Stage will make the conveyancing of property much less expensive, as long as we are able to negotiate with the lawyers and others who have made the process so expensive.

When preparing a few words on this subject, I noted that changing or buying a house should be no more difficult than buying a packet of cornflakes in a supermarket. Then I recalled a prototype supermarket, the Metro store, which I visited in Germany last week. My trip demonstrated what modern technology can do in a new supermarket. The supermarket has radio-frequency identification, RFID, whereby one can go to the checkout with €100 worth of goods and have their barcodes read in one second by radio technology. If one has already registered oneself as a customer of the store, one does not have to pay in the store. Retina identification is used to identify registered customers and the cost is immediately charged to their bank accounts. This sort of technology excites me.