Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill 2025: Report and Final Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-23
============================================================

Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

There are search warrants and arrest warrants, there are safeguards. The Minister's picture of the police at work suggests that any delay, anything that gets in the way or any check and balance is intolerable. Let us have everybody into every house they wish to go into. This is what the Minister is describing. What the Minister has described is that a check and balance would be extraordinarily onerous, whether or not he likes this check and balance. He could say "I do not like the Circuit Court". Let us bear in mind that on Committee Stage he also rejected moderate requests that at least a senior officer would be reviewing it and signing off. At the moment, it requires two members of the Garda at any level. The Minister specifies trained individuals. Are all gardaí in Ireland going to become experts in the appropriate uses of all AI technology? The Minister is not talking about designated gardaí or designated decision-making or a safety net within An Garda Síochána against which these decisions should be checked. It is literally one garda and any other garda.
The Minister does not like the requirement around the Circuit Court, but in adversarial cases people look for search warrants all the time and get them quickly. They look for search warrants and arrest warrants and this is a similar mechanism.

---

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