TJ McIntyre

The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk with Aviva Insurance.

So this is a continuation of existing problems.

really with the public services card concept which is that it was introduced as a limited tool for dealing with certain social welfare issues and ever since then there's been a scope creep a government push to turn it into a kind of de facto national id card without any legal basis for that so we've made complaints to the data protection commission about this and in 2019 the dpc upheld our first set of complaints and they said that it was illegal for the state to

demand that people present a public services card to access other services, such as to get driving licenses and so on.

And then in the second decision last year, the DPC said that the facial biometric component of the public services card, the requirements that you provide photographic ID, which is then matched against other government databases,

was also illegal.

And in fact, they've ordered the state to stop using it for that purpose.

So really, the real problem here is that you have a system which from the outset hasn't had a proper legal basis.

It's never been clear what it's been intended to do.

And I think we should pause and think about what we're trying to do with this.

National ID cards can be done well in some jurisdictions where they're designed from the ground up for that purpose.

And you have to think about two things there.

You have to think about not just the physical piece of plastic itself, but the underlying databases and how they're secured.

And we simply haven't had that conversation in Ireland to date.

So the Data Protection Commission was very clear about the risks presented by this kind of scope creep.

You can't either compel people to adopt something like this when it's not required by law or roll it out when you don't have adequate safeguards in place against its abuse, for example, by third parties who might have access to it if you're required to present it for age ID.

I mean, you can think about, for example, the abuses that might be made if when you

you were to present it for age ID and somebody were to take your PPS number from it.

So you have to think about these in advance rather than just say, well, it might have benefits.

Yes, it certainly might have benefits, but there's significant risks that have to be considered as well.