Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10
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Jim O'Callaghan (FF), Dublin Bay South

I thank all Senators for their contributions. It is important to point out that the purpose of this legislation is to protect people who are victims of crime and to provide An Garda Síochána with tools to investigate serious crimes. One of the crimes that would be most relevant to the biometric analysis when it is enacted is child sexual abuse material which is on video, because it will enable gardaí to use the tools of biometric analysis to see whether or not a child who has been sexually abused in one imagery is the same as a child in another. We need to bring it back to the practical benefits of this legislation in terms of protecting people who are victims. The alternative to it is that gardaí have to go through reams and endless hours of images to see is whether the same child is in that video as is seen subsequently.
I have spoken endlessly about identification and analysis. The important thing is the word "biometric". Biometric analysis can, I agree, ultimately lead to the identification of a person, but it does not lead to the immediate identification. Biometric identification does because it is done against a database. To use Senator Conway's example, an example would be images of people wanted for serious criminal offences of whom there are images on an Interpol or Europol site. When it comes to biometric identification, if they are on a database their names will come up and they can be arrested by the Garda on arrival into Dublin Airport as they are wanted for a serious offence elsewhere. That is biometric identification. However, with biometric analysis there is not a database.
Sometimes the criticism is that we just adopt everything that is happening in Europe. When it comes to domestic Irish legislation we are perfectly entitled to use our own definitions and our own interpretations or interpretation and that is what has been done in this legislation. A clear definition of biometric analysis is being set out. There is also a definition, separately, of biometric identification, saying it will not apply here. That is the one with the database. However, if we go for this amendment we will simply have a definition, as Senator Kelleher said, of biometric analysis and biometric identification, with no reference to the latter in the legislation.

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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