Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The public service card scheme has been very high and that has been an issue of concern for the Committee of Public Accounts in terms of excess. As such, I question whether there have been savings. It is also the case that the roll-out of public service cards was intensified during the period in which it was under review by the Data Protection Commissioner. There have been concerns about data protection and the section 10 investigation of the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner has been ongoing. There were also concerns and complaints about changes around how "biometric" was defined. I am not suggesting the concerns are within the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, albeit they probably should be. I note that when we are in an area in which we are not legally robust, we open the State to litigation, which also costs money.That is why I have endeavoured to ensure that we try to take whatever steps we can to minimise the vulnerability of the State. The Minister is as attached as am I to Exchequer funding being there for what it is needed for. That is why I do not like to see us taking certain risks in the way this is being approached and rolled out.

I am aware that the Minister and I will not come to a point of agreement on this but this is not the same as previous arrangements. Previously, we did not have photographs within that system that could be scanned. Contracts have been given for software that can allow these photographs to be processed. That is a concern. If we have photographs that can be processed through biometric processing - I am not going to reopen that debate because we have had it many times - that is very different from previous information that was in place in respect of public service identity in the past. It is not the same. That is one reason there will be a need for different and separate storage mechanisms in the future for the different parts of the information that is currently in the single customer view data set. Differentiations may need to be made within that data set, which is probably where we will end up in the future.

The SAFE process has been cited here. This is a process that Ireland has but it is not an international standard that has been set up. There are many international measures and standards but lest people get the impression that there is an onus on us to get SAFE 1 or SAFE 2 or SAFE 3, these are names of a system that Ireland has put in place. While we should strive for best practice, when doing so we should try to bring the best practice for data protection along with us. We have not done that as yet. The Minister and I disagree on this and I am not going to press this amendment but I had to respond.