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

Briefly, I agree about creating offences for things that potentially could be human error but the problem is that the ones where it is not human error can have a very serious consequence on the lives of people considering where we see these types of technologies being used. Going as far as creating an offence here is because of the carve-outs that exist in other places. When we look in particular at the information in Article 26(10) about requiring judicial approval for the use of technology, that creates a safeguard before the potential for any abuse or anything in contravention with the Act or the legislation. As those preventative measures have not been put into the legislation, that is why my amendment exists here. However, I would much prefer the Minister to be coming back to the Chamber with some of the more preventative measures that protects from abuse, that looks for that judicial approval, that looks at name and what the rank of garda is in terms of when there is two eyes on a piece of biometric identification. It is about starting here at this worst-case scenario where there has been an abuse and asking where we can walk back in the legislation to make sure we protect everybody from such an abuse. I referred earlier to some other countries. When we look at the Dutch police using financial incentives to encourage people, they are all very serious instances where technologies have been abused. I ask the Minister, between this Stage and when we meet again, to look at how we can put in some preventative measures in the legislation to ensure we do not get to the point where we are looking at the worst-case scenario of asking if there should be an offence if someone is in contravention with 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