Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill 2025: Report and Final Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-23 ============================================================ Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland Nonetheless, there is a property or an individual, either way. What the Minister is talking about here refers to the searching and the mechanisms. This relates to that definition. It is disingenuous to say this Bill has nothing to do with biometric identification, which is coming later, because he put the definition of biometric identification into this Bill. If the Minister claims it has no relevance to what is in the Bill, why insert a definition that is at odds with what is happening elsewhere and that includes names? If the Minister does not like the Circuit Court idea, why reject the concept of having sign-off from a senior garda? He may think the bar I am suggesting is too high. The bar as he has it right now is extraordinarily low and highly at odds with what is envisaged under the use of - I will say it because this is the last time I will get an opportunity to do so - high-risk AI systems that are categorised as such. Very few areas of AI usage are categorised as high risk. We are talking about high-risk tools being used on the say-so of any two gardaí. The Minister rejected the idea of the courts. Previously, he rejected the idea of senior officers. He has not proposed any other mechanism regarding how sign-off will be achieved. The Minister used examples. We all want to see these examples. That is why I referenced the idea of doing it post facto . The latter is something I would be open to. It is what is in the AI Act in the context of biometric identification. The AI Act refers to authorisation being requested within 48 hours. That would be satisfactory. I would be very happy with a different version of my amendment which did that in the case of missing persons and identifying those kinds of things. It is not simply the same to say that we are fighting crime and that crime is serious. We do not live in a world where it is only Batman and his sidekick involved, and if they both think it is worth doing, they can go ahead and do it. That is what the Bill sets out. We need to have safeguards. We have them in here because of the risks involved, including in the context of abuse, which the Minister rejected, as he did some of the safeguards around penalties put forward previously in relation to abuse. The Minister and I disagree on this. I reiterate that the bar as set out in this Bill is too low, does not provide adequate safeguards and falls very short of what is envisaged in the AI Act. The Minister may speculate about how I would have liked that to be and say that I am giving out. Of course, I have strong opinions about the AI Act and about the omnibus that will seek to dilute that Act during Ireland's EU Presidency. I have strong views on these things, but I also recognise that a process is at play. I am concerned that said process is being somewhat disregarded in the context of this domestic legislation, which seems to plough its own furrow. --- 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