Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill 2025: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-27 ============================================================ Robbie Gallagher (FF), Labour Panel Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire ar ais arís chuig an Seanad um thráthnóna. I welcome the Minister back to the House this afternoon. On behalf of the Fianna Fáil Group, I welcome this debate and very much support the Bill. We firmly believe that everyone deserves to feel safe in their home, in their community, on our streets and on public transport. To achieve this, citizens must have faith and trust in An Garda Síochána to effectively tackle crime. Providing gardaí with the technologies needed to deliver an effective policing service is a central goal to this. Currently, Garda investigations can involve teams spending months trawling through CCTV footage or footage captured on phones by passers-by. This Bill, if passed, will allow the retrospective use of biometric analysis by An Garda Síochána which will help members to carry out investigations quickly and efficiently, saving valuable Garda time. It will be of most assistance where time is of the essence to preserve a person from a threat of serious harm or a threat to their life. It will also save the gardaí from the harrowing work of poring over thousands or even millions of images and footage of child sexual abuse material. The use of biometric technology will be limited to cases of arrestable offences where it is proportionate and necessary. It will be subject to strict safeguards and a code of practice that will outline the specific data protection and human rights controls that must be taken into consideration when utilising this technology. In any serious investigation there can be a significant amount of digital data. Without data analysis tools, the length of investigations is likely to increase and have an impact on the Garda's ability to prevent and detect serious crime. The aim in proposing this legislation, as the Minister outlined, was to introduce a limited form of retrospective facial recognition which can assist An Garda Síochána to search CCTV, video footage, images or other documents, where it already does so manually, more quickly and more efficiently. The Bill amends the Garda Síochána Recording Devices Act 2023 in order to give effect to the Government decision to provide that biometric technologies may be used by An Garda Síochána. Biometric analysis is the automated organisation of biometric data of documents, including images of video footage. Its use will mean that gardaí could sort and filter, or cluster, relevant images from a collection of images or footage. It does not seek to identify a person. Rather, it seeks to find an instance of a person across the relevant images or footage where it is necessary and proportionate to do so. Under the Data Protection Act 2018, it is not possible for An Garda Síochána to process biometric data without a clear statutory basis. The power to carry out biometric analysis needs to be explicitly provided for and is set out in this Bill. Biometric technologies are already being utilised in police services across the EU and, indeed, in the UK as well. The Bill is subject to EU law in this area, including the AI Act and two regulations. The Bill was drafted with these two laws to the fore of its considerations and any future work in this area will have to ensure there is no conflict with EU law. The Bill contains a requirement that An Garda Síochána only carry out biometric analysis in the context of investigations of an arrestable offence. An arrestable offence, as the Minister outlined, is an offence for which a person of full capacity and not previously convicted may, under or by virtue of any enactment or of common law, be punished by imprisonment for a term of up to five years or by a more severe penalty, and includes an attempt to commit any such offence. Whether the processing of biometric data is relevant to a particular arrestable offence will be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Human rights and data protection impact assessments will be required as part of the procedure and drafting of a code of practice. The Data Protection Commission, among others, will be consulted during the drafting process. The purchase of commercial data basis, etc., against which biometric identification could run will be prohibited. As the Minister outlined, An Garda Síochána already maintains databases of images and has a legal basis to process images of individuals arrested or convicted under various enactments with the existing rules on retention of those images. The regulatory strategy throughout is to frame a Bill as a balanced response between privacy rights and public safety. I look forward to the Bill proceeding. --- 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/2026-05-27/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:00+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-27