Denis Naughten (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Fine Gael)
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Question 231: To ask the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform the position regarding the development of an Irish border information system; when the project will become live; if it will assist the Department of Social and Family Affairs; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [46795/09]

Dermot Ahern (Louth, Fianna Fail)
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On 11 March 2008, the Government approved the development of Phase 1 of an Irish Border Information System (IBIS). IBIS will operate by collecting passenger information from carriers which will be screened against immigration, Garda, and other watch lists of persons of interest to agencies participating in the project. Where a match occurs, the system will generate an alert which will be relayed to front line staff for appropriate action. The UK is currently rolling out such a system, known as "e-Borders".

A Project Development Team (PDT) has been put in place chaired by the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS) to scope out and progress the development of this system. The PDT comprises representatives from all the Agencies which may benefit from the advancement of the concept in this country including An Garda Síochána, the Department of Finance, the Revenue Commissioners, the Departments of Defence, Foreign Affairs, Social & Family Affairs, Enterprise, Trade & Employment, and Transport. It will be a matter for the individual agencies to identify areas where IBIS can be of benefit to their operations. The PDT has unanimously supported the development of such a system in Ireland.

It is proposed to develop IBIS in two phases. Phase 1 will initially involve the collection of Advanced Passenger Information (API) on one or two routes and matching this against one or two watch-lists. Building on this over a two year period, the system will be rolled out in stages until all air and sea passenger journeys between Ireland and destinations outside the Common Travel Area (CTA) are captured. During this roll-out period, Phase 2 of the project – likely to involve the capture of Passenger Name Record (PNR) information, passenger data from travel within the CTA, as well as building profiling and intelligence gathering functionality - will be explored.

From the outset, our priority has been to put in place a system which would initially allow us to monitor persons of interest entering and leaving the CTA. A vital element of this will be close cooperation and interaction with the UK e-borders system to enable both States to know if a person of interest to one State has entered or left the other. Officials in the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service and the UK Border Agency are examining ways to maximise such cooperation and interaction which would effectively ring fence the Common Travel Area and provide a basis for an entry/exit control system.

The effective monitoring of persons moving within the CTA continues to present a major challenge. Both States have confirmed that there will be no fixed controls in respect of persons travelling between North and South. Of course I am concerned, and I know that this concern is widely shared both here and in Great Britain, that persons can exploit this absence of fixed controls to move illegally within the CTA, including for the purposes of abusing the social welfare systems of both countries. In this regard, I would like to emphasise that the Garda National Immigration Bureau, the UK Border Agency and the British police work closely together and run regular intelligence led operations aimed at interrupting such illegal movement. These joint operations have successfully prevented foreign nationals moving illegally between the two jurisdictions. Officials from my Department, the Garda National Immigration Bureau and the UK Border Agency are examining ways to further build on this cooperation.

Underpinning legislative provisions for IBIS are being developed at the present time and will be taken forward in the context of the Immigration Residence and Protection Bill. Consideration of this Bill by the Oireachtas is due to resume in the new year. The country's economic circumstances in the last 15 months has meant that we have had to re-examine our thinking in how to bring forward this project. We are now developing in house a prototype which will inform a tendering process for the full scale system. It is intended to develop and implement the prototype during 2010 and early 2011 with a view to holding a tender competition for the full system soon after that.