Niall Ó Donnghaile (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I apologise to the Acting Chairman and the Minister for arriving late to today's debate. It is never good to be late for the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport. The purpose of the Bill is to protect citizens across Europe from criminals preying on them and evading arrest and detection in respective jurisdictions. It argues for national and state police and justice systems across the EU to improve co-operation with each other. The Bill allows state authorities to search each other's national and state databases of vehicle registration.

This pooling of information and the freedom to delve into it across EU member states raises issues of concern to do with the privacy and personal data of individuals, as other colleagues have outlined. It is, therefore, important that we understand the framework of protective measures that govern the application of the Bill for the general public here in this State. In doing so, we must examine whether they are adequate for the task.

The Prüm decision, out of which this Bill arises, emphasises the importance of respecting privacy and protecting personal data. Sensitive personal data will, therefore, not be disclosed as part of the response to searches. The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport is the State's point of contact for sending and responding to requests for vehicle registries and data under the Bill. The data may be shared with An Garda Síochána, the DPP and other appropriate persons. Data protection commissioners have the power to supervise the lawfulness of the treatment of the personal data under the proposed Act. The Data Protection Act 1998 is applied to the requests for access to personal information. It requires the use of the European car and driving licence information system, EUCARIS. It is limited to individual cases and records are to be deleted after two years.

On this basis, Sinn Féin welcomes any sensible and considered measures designed to protect people from criminals. However, we may table amendments on Committee Stage. As I suppose is often the case with this type of Bill, there is always concern that people are not given adequate protection as private citizens when dealing with data protection. We have seen breaches across the institutions of this State on numerous occasions, despite being reassured frequently about the protection of our personal data. Some of these breaches involve human error and others are more malign. We approach the Bill with the intention of supporting it while raising some of those concerns now and on further Stages as the Bill progresses.

We are concerned about a number of issues, one being the scale of the information sought. It strikes me that information on individuals held on the Garda PULSE system, as well as driver licence details, would be sufficient. In section 4(5), there is a reference to “other persons” the State considers “appropriate” to share the requested data with. Who are these other “appropriate persons”?

We will allow the Bill to pass to the next Stage, when we hope the Minister will provide answers to these and indeed other questions that we might have. From what I have seen and heard, I understand that the Minister gets our concerns in respect of data protection and protecting the rights of private citizens. I look forward to hearing from him.