Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill 2025: Report and Final Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-05-13 ============================================================ Jim O'Callaghan (FF), Dublin Bay South I thank Deputy Carthy for his amendment and Deputy Gannon for his contribution. As I said at the outset, the purpose of this legislation is to provide an additional tool to An Garda Síochána in order to expedite its investigations. This is not a tool that will be used for the purpose of putting evidence before a court to convict a person of a criminal offence. It is an instrument that will be of benefit to gardaí when they are going through very significant amounts of CCTV footage. As I said previously on Committee Stage, this amendment would, in my opinion, make the system incapable of effective operation. As I said, the gardaí will be assisted by this provision in sorting and filtering data in order that a human reviewer can narrow down avenues of investigation. Let us take an example of where biometric analysis will be of considerable assistance to An Garda Síochána. This is in investigations of child sexual abuse material. As an aside, I should say that earlier today I was at the launch of the annual report of the Irish Internet Hotline. It is an excellent report, but it does reveal the extent to which child sexual abuse material is being derived, accessed and used by people in Ireland. It is something we need to be constantly vigilant about and ensure that we have a very strong ability within An Garda Síochána to investigate it and prosecute it. If we take the example of a child sexual abuse material investigation, there could be thousands of images over which biometric analysis could be performed. If the approach in the amendment were to be adopted, it would require the biometric analysis of each image to be approved by a chief superintendent. We would clearly lose valuable time seeking authorisations. We would lose time identifying vulnerable victims and waste valuable Garda time. I regret to say it would make no operational sense to proceed in the manner proposed by the amendment. Identifiable persons will be responsible for not only reviewing the footage or images, but responsible for any decisions made in the course of an investigation. Biometric analysis could aid investigators by finding all instances of a distinctive facial feature or scar in what can be hundreds of thousands of images or videos on a single seized device. All searching proposed in this Bill is for investigative leads only. It has the potential to group relevant images together, so a person can either review the footage or have a starting point for that review. Inserting an authorisation process for the carrying out of biometric analysis, as is suggested by this amendment, would, in my opinion, be unnecessary. This, as I said, is a decision-support tool with clear safeguards set out in the Bill, including approval by both Houses for a code of practice. Biometric analysis could be used to search for general biometric characteristics for an unidentified victim, a suspect, a person who is a threat to the security of the State or indeed a missing person. However, there are also conditions that must be met in order for those searches to be permitted and these include that it has to be necessary and proportionate in the context of a specific criminal investigation into serious offences, offences which have penalties of five years or more, a matter relating to national security, or in a missing person investigation. It can also only be used on documents gathered in the context of that investigation. An authorisation does need to be reserved for the most intrusive use in cases. The Bill is about using technology to aid investigative work, not to replace it. For those reasons, I cannot accept Deputy Carthy's amendment. I note what Deputy Gannon said in respect of the EU AI Act. I want to emphasise again that the Bill will be in line with EU law. The Commission guidelines for high-risk AI systems are still in drafting and have been reviewed by member states with feedback provided. These will include a list of practical examples of use cases of AI systems that are high risk or not high risk. While the guidelines will act as an interpretive tool in understanding how to implement the AI Act, the European Court of Justice will be the ultimate arbiter of the AI Act and its provisions. --- 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/2026-05-13/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:03+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-13