Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Since we have moved away from the issue of children's rights and are dealing with a more general issue, I want to put one of the views on the record. The general data protection regulation, GDPR, is the culmination of a development of European Union law on data protection in which the progress towards protection and regulation has been inexorable and is becoming increasingly more complicated. Increasingly more bodies are now being required to have authorised officers and the like, and increasingly more people are being sucked into this general regulatory sphere.

The whole purpose of data protection was to protect people from the technological changes which were making data increasingly more available and potentially damaging to individuals. One of the weirdest steps that was ever taken was to extend data protection to paper records. I have never understood why that was done. It was an overly-excited group of people at European Union level who agreed to do that.

I do not see why paper files, which are not accessible to the public, should be the subject of such regulation. If we had not had the electronic revolution and the Internet combined, I do not believe the member states of the European Union would ever have agreed to introduce this kind of protective regime in respect of paper records in the form of physical material stored in filing cabinets and the like. It was a somewhat promiscuous extension of a series of rights and remedies to an area which was not necessary in the first place. There are so many written records on paper which do not need all of this paraphernalia and all of this series of protections.

People are now being sucked into the status of being data processors. I refer to solicitors, perhaps even barristers and all sorts of service providers of a very insignificant kind, people running small businesses around the country. To ask them to suddenly become subject to this generalised regime has been a big mistake. It is irreversible on a national level now because the train has left the station. Paper records are included. They should never have been included in the first place. I am availing of this occasion to make an entirely ineffectual bleat of protest that this should never have happened in the first place.