I welcome and support the views expressed by Deputy Boland and I welcome the Minister's commentary. The experience has been that across Departments, the level of engagement with AI differs. Specifically when we are talking here about public sector procurement, which was mentioned, we need to explore the use of agentic AI. I want to be clear there should always be human oversight in this space but I mean the use of agentic AI in, for instance, how we can map vendor capabilities to Government needs, in terms of tender design, and particularly in terms of intelligent bids and contract monitoring. I often say that if we were able to use agentic AI in the case of the national children's hospital, for instance, where so many variables were being addressed it could be done more efficiently. I appreciate the guidelines for the responsible use of AI are very important and we do need to have human oversight but at different levels of Government this is moving at different speeds and it varies from Department to Department.

Sentiment score: 0.49

I ask the Minister for Public Expenditure; Infrastructure; Public Service Reform and Digitalisation the criteria applied in assessing projects under the digital public service transformation fund, including the way in which service improvement, efficiency gains and potential for wider roll-out are considered.

Sentiment score: 0.78

I welcome in particular the moves towards the digitalisation of life events. I commend the work of the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer on everything that is being done there. It is also very important not just to have the business case but that there is also the technological know-how around what it is we are hoping to achieve. One of the most critical things the Minister's Department will be overseeing is the digitalisation of health records, obviously in conjunction with the Department of Health. It is deeply frustrating to me how long it is taking. I would like assurances and perhaps the Minister will outline where we are with the plan for awarding of contracts on that. Will the Minister give assurances that, with citizens' consent, there is the possibility that anonymised health records can also be used for clinical research? That would make a lot of sense in terms of how that informs our health service. I would be grateful if the Minister could provide us with an update.

Sentiment score: 0.27

I welcome that commitment. It will be transformational. It is my own view, and I do not think it is underestimating it to say, that our records not being digitalised is probably costing our health service up to a billion euro a year in terms of delays and in the failure to be able to use some of that data towards clinical research. We need to start to talk about a campaign for when we move to that situation to encourage citizens to agree to this data being used in an anonymised form to inform clinical research, which will result in further efficiencies. I am worried that we are not moving quickly enough on some of this. Along with the digitalisation process we also need an information campaign to explain to citizens the benefit of what we are actually achieving. There have been 20 years of the Clinical Research Centre at UCD. We should think about the achievements it could have if it were able to have access to some of this data in partnership with other clinical research centres.

Sentiment score: 0.14