Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming to the House. As Members have said, we dealt with the pre-legislative scrutiny of this Bill in the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach. The committee asked for the Bill to be published as soon as possible, so I welcome its introduction in the Seanad.

While the Data Protection Bill 2018 has been passed, this Bill deals with the data implications for citizens' interactions with the State. The Minister of State stressed the increased amount of State services being carried out online, so it is welcome that there will be clear guidelines for how the State agencies share personal data. In Our Public Service 2020 there is major emphasis on eGovernment and more services going online. Is the Minister of State's Department in contact with the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment to ensure that with more services going online people will have access to high speed, regular broadband to avoid a situation of being excluded? Online services are no use to people if vast areas of the State still have no reliable access to high speed broadband.

In section 17 there is a reference to data sharing arrangements. Will the details of these arrangements be available to the public and will they be subject to freedom of information requests? Earlier this year in the finance committee I raised Brexit and the fact that some State services such as JobPath were tendered to companies based in a jurisdiction that might be out of the EU in the future. Can the Minister of State give any guarantees that all companies, domestic, EU and foreign, will be subject to the provisions in the Bill? Is there any provision in the Bill for the logging of data sharing, which the Minister addressed in his speech? Should an audit have to take place it is important that there is a record of what data were shared and for what reason. I welcome the proposal in the Bill that there be a citizens' portal where people can check what data belonging to them have been shared between agencies.A rationale must also be provided for why the data were shared. If one State agency asks another to pass data on to it, there should be an express reason for that which is understandable to the citizen. This is a very complex subject but we need to address it in an accessible and understandable way such that people can feel confident about the quality of data that is being shared and who is sharing it.