Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill 2025: Report and Final Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-23 ============================================================ Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland I hate to say that the Minister and I are not in agreement. I do not believe there is a difference, or any substantial difference, between biometric analysis, as the Minister defines it in this Bill, and biometric identification, as it is defined in the EU law. They are actually almost exactly the same. What the Minister describes under biometric analysis and what is described under biometric identification in the EU law are the same. Where there is a difference is between the Minister's definition of biometric identification in this legislation and the EU definition of biometric identification. The Minister is defining biometric identification differently to the EU AI Act. That is quite an extraordinary thing to do. The Minister did not address in his response this newly invented narrowing of the frame to "a database of one or more named individuals". A database of named individuals being one half of the comparison is not biometric identification under the EU law. The EU law is comparing biometric information with biometric information and what the Minister has just described is this different activity. It may be a worthy activity. Maybe the Minister could take this activity of comparing biometric information with a database of named individuals and give that a name. Maybe we could give that a new name. Maybe we could call that "biometric name alignment checking" or whatever we want, but that is a different and very specific, narrower activity. It is extremely important that the Minister start getting this right. The Minister says he has new legislation coming, but will his new biometric identification legislation be narrowed to when biometric information is compared to databases of names that are made up of letters and not biometric information? Named individuals is not the category. Let us talk about things that are biometric. Some of the things that are biometric are "physical, physiological or behavioural human features". Those are biometric pieces of information. That is what the Minister is proposing to compare under biometric analysis through "automated recognition and categorising of instances of physical, physiological or behavioural human features", and that they would be compared in respect of other instances of the particular unidentified individual. There is identified and unidentified. That is only a matter of if you know their name, but the key point is the Minister is comparing the "physical, physiological or behavioural human features" with the goal of, as the Minister said, ruling persons in or out. Therefore, this is around saying that you think this person whom you see on the bus and this person whom you see in this photograph is the same person. That is part of that process of biometric identification. You are not looking at a searching or a gathering of the pure databases. You are looking for where you seek to find physiological, physical or behavioural feature A matching up with the same feature in database B. There is another point that I made that the Minister did not respond to, I am afraid. The Minister went back to the suggestion of us comparing the photograph with our Interpol most wanted list or whatever we might want to do, but that would be comparing biometric information with relevant other information, which may include biometric but also includes names. It is a particular category. What is described in recital 17 to the Act and the example given is not that. This is an example described by the drafters of the EU AI Act as to what post-remote biometric identification might look like. They describe pictures, such as the photograph the Minister just mentioned, or video footage generated by closed circuit television cameras or private devices like a phone, and comparing the biometric information in one with the biometric information in the other. That is biometric identification. That is how it is described by the drafters of the EU AI Act and that is exactly what the Minister has described under his biometric analysis, which is, in respect of an unidentified individual, the automated recognition and categorising of physical, physiological or behavioural human features by processing different documents in respect of other instances of "the particular" unidentified individual. The Minister is saying that we have identified this particular individual and now we will go and identify them in other instances in other forms of databases and other forms of footage. However this is flipped and spun, what the Minister is describing there - the particular individual appearing in different footage - is exactly what is being described as the comparison between footage generated by private devices, pictures and footage, and the language generated and looked at in terms of a natural person. The EU drafters are very explicit that that is irrespective of the technology processes or types of biometric data used. It is a concern that the safeguards that should be attached to the kinds of activity proposed in relation to biometric analysis are not being attached because of the renaming of it as biometric analysis. There is an even greater concern that this Bill seeks to narrow the scope and change the important definition of biometric identification set out in the EU AI Act, again, set out, because it is identified as a high-risk AI system. It is categorised as high risk. For a security conscious Minister and a Minister concerned with justice, when something is categorised as high risk, surely we should not be trying to narrow and dilute its application. When something is categorised as high risk, we should not accept it is high risk but only use the safety net in this one instance of it, if it is comparing with the database of named individuals, even though safety nets are recommended across the board for the kinds of activity comparing biometric with biometric. I would like clarity on why the Minister is choosing to narrow biometric identification to only where it is being compared with databases of named individuals in absolute difference of approach to anything in the AI Act. Why is that choice being made? We can continue to use different terms in terms of biometric analysis, but I would like an answer in terms of that. Will the Minister accept that where biometric analysis is being compared, the databases can include CCTV and footage from a Garda recording device, for example? That is what I would like to clarify, that is, it is not narrowed to solely that category and it is quite serious. --- 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/2026-06-23/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:05+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-23