Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I want to talk about the general data protection regulation, GDPR, which normally nods people off to sleep, unless they are like me and get very excited about it. When Max Schrems took Facebook to court here in Ireland, a decision was made which brought about a change in the obligations on companies. Until then, if a company was exporting data out of the European Union or a European Union-aligned country with an adequacy decision, all it had to do was have standard contractual clauses and other mechanisms to ensure there was a standard of data compliance. Since the Schrems decision, a company that is exporting data has the obligation not only to ensure that the recipient of those data is up to an EU standard but that the country the recipient is in also is up to that standard. We are a few weeks from Brexit and, at this time, it looks as if the UK is going to be what is considered a third country if we have no deal, and we also have the Schrems decision.

I am looking for a debate and discussion in the Chamber at some point to at least bring to public attention these hidden consequences. The Schrems decision would have happened anyway but its implications with regard to Brexit and the EU, and whether we have a deal or not, are naturally being overshadowed by larger and more serious issues. However, it is also a very serious issue and I raised it in the context of the Brexit debate yesterday. We have a duty to have a discussion with the public in this regard because there is a burden on small companies, and this applies even within the Houses. If we think about it, our email system is on an American-based and owned company system. The ramifications of this are enormous and yet we are not really talking about it and it has fallen off the agenda, even if that is for very good reasons. I ask for time for us to expose, discuss and ventilate all of these consequential obligations that are occurring at the moment.