Maurice Cummins (Fine Gael)

This is a new section that was not debated in this House. I am not even sure if it was reached on Report Stage in the other House. I cannot accept the Minister's explanation that the question of provisions regarding CCTV have only now arisen in regard to a Bill which has been in gestation for two years. The mind boggles in this regard because CCTV has been in operation for a considerable time with pilot projects in place eight or ten years ago. One of the initial pilot projects was supposed to take place in my own city but this never came about. It is disgraceful that an entirely new section was introduced on Report Stage in the Dáil.

There are a number of questions in regard to this section and the Minister touched on only some of them. They include issues of staffing, monitoring, the controls that are available and the retention of footage. It is utterly undesirable that the lives of innocent people should be exposed. The Minister needs to provide further explanation in regard to the retention of CCTV footage and the controls in this regard. He dealt with some aspects of this but we are talking about a new section which should have been debated at length in both Houses. They way in which this has been included willy nilly is totally unacceptable. The Minister "shall issue guidelines" to the Commissioner regarding the supervision and control of the monitoring. What type of guidelines? We should know, as we discuss this section, the types of guidelines which will be put in place in terms of monitoring. This is the time and the debate to do so. With regard to "persons who meet the established criteria", what are these criteria? Why do we not have the established criteria in front of us? That is a broad area. We want to know and should be informed. This is the place where the issue should be debated. What are the guidelines and criteria? If we are asked after this Bill goes through, we will still be unable to answer and the public will not know what they are. They should be laid down.

The Bill then states that "the Government shall, by order, establish criteria for the purposes of subsection 3(c)". An earlier line refers to subsection 3(b) and that different criteria for different classes may be established. It is again all up in the air. They are words without meaning. We want to put meat on the bone in the context of these criteria and guidelines. I hope that the Minister can do so this evening.