Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-10 ============================================================ Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland The analogy of a tool was used. As Senator Ruane has said, we all want the right tools to be in place so that we can do the work of identifying, of bringing justice to place, etc. However, what we have here is a tool which has lots of question marks about biometric identification. There has been a rigorous process of debate to figure out biometric identification and what the safeguards are. When you use a tool, is it a tool you need safety equipment with? Is it a tool that requires preparation? Is it a tool that should be deployed in this way or that way? Every aspect of how you use this tool in an appropriate way has been collectively worked on and thought about at European level. We may not like everything about what has come out of that process, and others may not like it, but the point is that there has been a rigorous and long collective process of developing the tool, and of talking about that tool, what the safeguards are and how you use the tool. As we know, the use of any tool, however useful, can have inadvertent consequences. For example, it can cause injury and can cause damage. Now we have a Bill that says we are inventing a brand new tool. We have skipped the process, skipped all that EU discussion and skipped the AI Act. We have our own tool that we have invented here. It is not the tool we have surrounded with safeguards and hassle-filled safety equipment to determine how biometric identification will be used. It is not that; it is another tool that we can use how we like. That is dangerous and it has negative consequences for everybody. It has negative consequences in terms of how it might be used. It has negative consequences because it separates us from all of those proper and appropriate safeguards of the law. It has negative consequences even when it comes, as Senator Ruane has outlined, to the courts because it is totally ambiguous. We absolutely need to check the invented definition of "biometric identification" that has been put into this Bill. It separates itself from identifications because the AI Act provides that biometric identification is "comparison of ... biometric data with the biometric data". That is what biometric identification is. It is not the comparison of biometric data with a list of names; for instance, biometric data compared with where you went to school or biometric data compared with any other factor. It is biometric data compared with biometric data - those two being put together. As for that bank of impressive cameras that Senator Kelleher saw recording in Cork, were they instantly deleting or were they recording? Can they go an hour back? Can they go two hours back? Can they go three hours back? Of course they can, because they are there for public safety, and they are databases. Unless that is a glide feed with no recording, it is a database and it is one of the databases that the other images will be compared against. The Minister is comparing biometric information with biometric information in another database and that is biometric identification. That is what it is. Straight up, it is not a different thing. This thing of introducing the names just does not stand up. The Minister also failed to answer the concerns as stated by the European Data Protection Board in its clear messaging in relation to the guideline on the use of facial recognition technology in exactly those scenarios the Minister outlined in remote processing in public spaces for identification purposes. Has the Minister considered the legal implications in relation to those guidelines from the European Data Protection Board? Does the Minister believe that naming it as "analysis" rather than as "identification" is getting around the ruling they made in relation to the exact scenarios he described? Is that the Minister's understanding? Does the Minister believe that he would be able to say it was analysis, not identification, in relation to the breaches under Article 7 and Article 8 that they identified? --- 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/2026-06-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:02+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-10