Public Services Card
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-30
============================================================

Dara Calleary (FF), Mayo

As the Deputy said, the ruling is under appeal. We are appealing it. I also thank the committee for beginning pre-legislative scrutiny of the social welfare Bill yesterday. There are initiatives contained in that Bill for a card holder to use their public service card for identity purposes at their own discretion in exactly the same way they can do with a driving licence or a passport. That is particularly for people looking for ID for bank accounts or credit unions, etc. We are trying to give people the ability to use the card at their own discretion and judgment.
The public service card currently does not display card holders' dates of birth. The proposed changes provide for a card holder to opt in to have their date of birth inscribed on their public service card. If they so wish, they can have it removed at a later point. Since 2012, over 5 million people have completed the SAFE registration process for the public service card. There are approximately 3.5 million users of MyGovID who complete about 60 million transactions per annum. It makes the provision of services a lot easier and quicker for citizens.

---

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/dail/2026-04-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-30