Criminal Law, Civil Law and Defence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Report and Final Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-02 ============================================================ Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland I have two comments to make about that. First, the stop and search powers that we were concerned with are not ones where the unique identifier would come into place. Under the stop and search powers, where somebody is stopped and searched and found, for instance, not to have any specified articles in their possession, there is no criminal justice follow-on from that and, therefore, there is no record of them thereafter. I fully accept the Minister's point that it is desirable that, if a person is the subject of a prosecution, conviction or sentence, they be identifiable and traceable in a sensible way right across the criminal justice system at every level. I have no problem with that concept. However, it does not deal with the issue that Senator Ruane and I were dealing with, which is knowing how many people are randomly, or near randomly, searched unsuccessfully on streets throughout the country, and what kind of people they are. The PPS number or the criminal identifier will not supply the data in respect of them because there will be no need to do so unless we amend the law to say that we can stop somebody on Camden Street, search them for drugs, find they have no drugs, but also inquire of them what their PPS number is. That is never going to happen. As I said, the only PPS number of which I am aware is my VAT number, and if it were not for that, I would have no idea what my PPS number is. Second, a lot of stuff is coming through now where, for instance, registers of people convicted of domestic abuse and the like are being created as a matter of law for the protection of innocent people who have to deal with people who have records in those areas. I consulted the procedure for changing your name. I discovered that it can be done very easily in the High Court by registering a deed poll of your intention to be known by a different name in the future. I consulted the publicly available register of name changes. I urge everyone in this House, if they have a spare half hour, to look at what is happening. There is a minority of people who are simply changing their name for reasons that I think are to do with gender issues, and changing from Patrick to Patricia, or whatever it may be, but they are a small minority. The great majority seem to be for other reasons, none of which are specified. Somebody consulting the register who sees a name change cannot be sure who they are dealing with because, on the publicly available register, they do not know the address or the antecedents of the person who is changing his or her name for whatever reason. Members would be very surprised to see the number of people who are changing their names every month in Ireland. The alarm bells go off in my mind when I see some of them. Some I can understand completely. For example, on their birth certificate, they were registered as having somebody as their father, or maybe they were adopted or quasi-adopted by another family and want to be known by their second name. If the consequence of a name change in those circumstances is that somebody is entitled to have a passport in their chosen name, or if somebody who has been convicted of domestic abuse wants to avoid the consequence of being on the register, and socially just wants to change their name and sail under a different flag, there is very little that can be done about it. I ask the Minister to take a long, hard look at the rules for name change as they exist in Ireland. They seem to reflect a very much more relaxed and 18th or 19th-century view of the entitlement to change your name. Given the consequences for dealings with the State and the like, at the very least, one would imagine that the published register of people who are changing their name would contain a PPS number as an identifier in the manner that the Minister is proposing for the criminal justice system generally, but we do not have that. Those are the two points I would make on the matter. First, the stop and search powers are not really dealt with by a unique identifier because a criminal procedure must be initiated for them to come into question. Second, we have an unaddressed issue in relation to the capacity of people to conceal their former selves by changing their name. It is possible. Anybody can change their name. Somebody who has been convicted of a very serious offence sitting in Mountjoy can change their name. It is a ridiculous situation, and I ask the Minister to look at it. --- 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/2026-07-02/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:09+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-02