European Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-16 ============================================================ Lynn Ruane (IND), University of Dublin I have a few questions. Some parts of my contribution hang on not fully having an understanding of how this EU opt-in will intersect with the international co-operation office Bill, which is at the heads of Bill stage at the justice committee. Under that Bill, we will see a situation where a body is set up to facilitate the transfer to other jurisdictions when an investigation is happening of data that is owned and controlled within Ireland. I am not sure how this motion intersects with that proposed legislation and proposed body. Will that body become the competent authority for the transfer of data? We see that more flexibility is given in this motion concerning the transfer of data. I have raised my concerns at the justice committee. If Ireland owns and controls the data and a third party that is not the Judiciary or the Minister for justice is making a decision on what data is shared, how do we ensure full oversight and compliance with regulations and certain protocols but also regarding our own structures or what we determine to be criminality? I understand in this article it lays out assassination, murder, rape and stuff like that but I have concerns about this transfer of data and whether it is for investigation or actually mapping surveillance. If we look at Hungary, for example, we have countries that are rolling back on their human rights. They are introducing laws relating to the banning of abortion. We have other countries that are really clamping down on liberation with regard to free protest and free speech. Where do these intersect with those types of laws? If we have a third body, competent authority or this other general scheme that is setting up an authority that will transfer data, how do we ensure we are not contributing to laws that Ireland would not generally have any sort of allegiance to? I do not think Ireland wants to contribute to somebody being prosecuted in another country where there are human rights abuses. This switches from being a Department of justice request and it will be possible to make requests directly to the Judiciary. There is a third step in other legislation that is about data, whereby we will see another body set up to facilitate that data. I do have questions on the constitutionality piece, if we remove the Judiciary from that conversation. I need to understand what constitutes a competent authority. Is a competent authority going to eventually be named as this other body, the international co-operation office? If somebody crosses a border into a country and there is a surveillance aspect to that, if no notification has been given and a large body of data is collected in another country and a period of time has passed before that notification happens, is that data permissible and who owns that data? If that continues to be tracked, are we allowing data to be obtained across another border and then passed over somewhere else without us having full oversight as to why that data is being used? On the one hand, it is very easy for us to say we need to investigate crime and make sure trafficking or murder are not happening but we cannot allow it to also be a backslide and a back door to an infringement of data privacy, when we look at how this protocol interacts with the regulatory roll-back that is being mooted now in respect of the digital omnibus regulation proposal. Another one of my questions relates to how we are going to impose any restrictions on how a recording device is used by another state party on our authority. Will we ban that being used in homes? Is there going to be a bar we set in which that type of surveillance can happen within our own borders if someone was to cross from another state into ours? I will repeat the question: am I presuming correctly that the Government will ultimately designate the international co-operation office to take on this role? That will, in fact, replace a function that the Judiciary has under the previous protocol and as it stands now. What happens if the State has contracts with private companies for the provision of technical recording devices? Are there safeguards in place to ensure any data gathered is held exclusively by the states and will not be held by the contracted private operators? Ireland is obviously in a different position from many other EU states as we are primarily responsible for a huge amount of the high-tech industries here. That means we will have other bodies outside of EU states holding data within our country. What role do they, as service providers, play in determining what types of data we will facilitate across borders? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-12-16/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:28+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-16