Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10
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Lynn Ruane (IND), University of Dublin

I thank the Minister. After all the time in pre-legislative scrutiny and on the AI committee spent exploring what is and is not identification, facial recognition and so on, it is really difficult to understand how this Bill is about analysis when it carves out that one sentence saying it is not identification.
If two CCTV clips are being compared, where are those clips being stored? The analysis still results in identification. It is hard to see how analysis, which will exist in this legislation, will not ultimately result in identification.
It is not that I am trying to get a carve-out here. Biometric identification is something I have an issue with but I also have an issue with how this Bill is written. I have an issue with how the rest of the definition is written when we compare it with the AI Act. The AI Act calls it identification. The Minister's definition of “biometric analysis” is called "biometric identification" in the AI Act. For me, this is about making sure we call this what it is, regardless of whether we have different views on how it should be used.
I refer to Recital 40, in particular, in relation to the purposes of law enforcement and the special carve-out Ireland seems to have in relation to biometric analysis and its definition in terms of "identification". The Minister has said he will be bringing forward legislation in future. Are we saying, though, that it is not bound by the rules of Article 5 in respect of this legislation around prohibited AI practices? When the Minister tells me about biometric analysis, it sounds exactly like biometric identification. A database and the ability to use a comparison to identify a person exist in both scenarios. In a situation where somebody is missing or in a crime-related context, that analysis still results in biometric identification. I am not certain that I agree with biometric identification and have concerns about it but my concern is that leaving this sentence in this legislation is actually misleading when we look at the rest of the definition in comparison to the EU AI Act.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-06-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-10