Feargal Quinn (Independent)

May I comment on Senator Mansergh's reference to corporation tax? I agree it is a real reminder of the benefits we have enjoyed in this part of the country and of the disadvantage the Northern part of the country has experienced by being connected to the United Kingdom. Whether devolved government would give them some ability to break that link in the future is interesting from that point of view.

I ask that we consider having a debate on privacy. I am not talking about media intrusion because legislation will be forthcoming on that issue, but a conference is taking place in Britain today which has just published some papers the contents of which are frightening. They state that Britain is the most snooped upon nation in the world. I do not know whether that is true but they believe it is true. They talk about the number of closed circuit television cameras that intrude on people's lives, the DNA database of almost 3.6 million citizens in Britain that is available, understandably, to police and others in an anti-terror campaign, and the fact that we can detect where each of us have been because of the phones we carry on our person, even if we never made a phone call. When I inquired recently about somebody in the United States, I was interested to discover that one can find out what every citizen in the United States who pays tax earned last year. I am referring to these trends because there is another piece of information available to us, namely, patients' medical records which are available under certain circumstances to certain individuals.

We are in danger of a Big Brother attitude taking over in western civilisation. There may be great benefits to be derived from having information about the way we run our lives available to others, but it is something we should consider debating. The Data Protection Commissioner publishes a report every year. This House has not debated it. That would be a worthy debate to determine whether this is the direction in which we want to go.