Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I think there might be some confusion because the Bill currently requires public bodies to enter into formal data-sharing agreements to share data that set out, among other things, that the data will be shared, the purposes for which it is shared, as outlined in the Bill, the processing that will be carried out in the data, and how the data will be kept. The Bill also requires that the data-sharing agreements be published in advance and open to consultation. Nothing in the Bill would preclude Members of this House, the other House, or the Data Protection Commissioner from making any kind of observations. The data protection officers in public bodies who are party to the data-sharing agreement must be satisfied in the first instance that there is agreement and compliance with the data protection law before the agreement is submitted to the data governance board for further scrutiny as to its compliance with data protection. We have to be confident that any public bodies entering into any agreement have to be satisfied that the existing legislative structure and the GDPR are complied with.That is being done because the data governance board, for which strict provision has been made in the Bill, will arbitrate on the agreements which will be subject to further scrutiny by the Data Protection Commissioner. They will also be laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas and, as the Bill lays out, the Minister of the day will also have a role in their compilation. None of what I have identified as part of the Bill is laid out in section 38 of the Data Protection Act. That goes to the core of what the Senator has said, namely, that the Bill reinforces the provisions and supports and scaffolds section 38 of the Data Protection Act in a way that is not done currently. On that basis, anything that would dilute or erode the provisions of this section would have unintended consequences which I know is not what the Senator intends, and erode exactly what we are trying to have constituted in the Bill in the first instance. On that basis, I cannot support the amendment.