Nobody is for a second disputing the problem this legislation is trying to solve. The reality is electronic evidence now forms part of almost every criminal investigation, whether organised crime, fraud, child exploitation, trafficking or terrorism. The days when investigations were confined to physical evidence and paper trails are long gone. The need for international co-operation is real, as is the need to modernise how evidence is gathered, but good intentions do not automatically make good legislation. What concerns me about this Bill is it feels like another example of a Department of justice, led by the Minister, that has become obsessed with speed, efficiency and finding shortcuts, and increasingly detached from the practical realities of delivering the public services and judicial services we need. In short, it is all hurry and no pace. When you scratch beneath the surface of this proposal, there are enormous questions that remain unanswered. The first is resourcing. During pre-legislative scrutiny, the Department told the committee that Ireland could ultimately become responsible for processing over 300,000 electronic evidence requests every year because so many of the major technology companies operating across Europe were headquartered here. With 300,000 potential requests, the Department has budgeted exactly €2.8 million and allocated an initial staff complement of 30 people. I struggle to understand how anyone can look at those figures and conclude that they remotely add up to the seriousness of what we are discussing. The Department itself admitted during scrutiny that it did not yet know how many of those requests would require intervention and what the final staffing requirement would be. It admitted that the office may eventually require 150 staff or more. Let us be honest about what is happening here. We are being asked to establish a major new State body with significant powers and responsibilities without knowing how much it will ultimately cost, how many staff it will require or whether the proposed model is remotely capable of coping with the workload that is potentially coming, and it is being sold to us in the language of efficiency. Everything is about speeding things up. Everything is about streamlining processes but there is a difference between efficiency and what appears to me to be wishful thinking on the Minister's part. If he genuinely believes that 30 staff can oversee a system potentially dealing with hundreds of thousands of requests every year, we are not building an efficient system; we are building a backlog, building delays, building appeals and, ultimately, building costs - far greater costs that if the system had been properly designed and resourced in the first place. The second major concern I have is regarding the human rights implications of this Bill. One of the most important issues raised during pre-legislative scrutiny was the reality that not every EU member state had the same track record when it came to civil liberties, democratic standards and human rights protection. We heard concerns about democratic backsliding, surveillance powers, and journalists, activists and minority groups who potentially might be targeted. The answers we received about hugely important matters, such as abortion rights, freedom of expression and LGBT rights, were not particularly reassuring. In fact, the Department acknowledged that if the new office did not intervene within the required timeframe, the service provider may simply proceed regardless. I ask the Minister to think about that. The safeguards in the system are only as strong as the capacity of the office tasked with enforcing them, which brings us directly back to the resourcing issue because rights-based protections on paper are meaningless if the body responsible for protecting those rights is overwhelmed from day 1, and that is precisely why the amendments to the Bill are so important. Amendments dealing with human rights protections, double criminality, transparency and reporting requirements are not attempts to derail the legislation. They are attempts to make it workable. They seem like attempts to introduce the safeguards that many people assumed would already be present. The amendments requiring greater scrutiny would not constitute an offence under Irish law and the amendments strengthening accountability are fundamental safeguards that this Bill needs, and if the Government is not willing to accept those safeguards or bring forward alternatives that achieve the same objective, I do not believe that this legislation is tenable in its current form. The Department is effectively asking us to trust a system of extraordinary scale while simultaneously admitting that it does not yet know what scale that system will operate at. That is the exact moment when safeguards matter most. Not after something goes wrong or rights have been infringed, but before these powers are granted. This Bill does not exist in isolation. It is part of a pattern of decision-making within the Department of justice, led by the Minister, where efficiency increasingly appears to trump expertise. I will highlight one recent example of that that left me shocked to my core, namely, the contract awarded to respond to the arrival of unaccompanied minors. A management services company, one that specialises in pest control, was awarded that contract. You could not make that up. At the same time that highly skilled organisations with extensive experience in trauma-informed care for children and young people were applying for that work, a management company that specialised in pest control was awarded the contract, but, apparently, that is where expertise mattered. That is where efficiency mattered. That, unfortunately, is exactly the same mindset that seems to underpin legislation such as this - the belief that if we centralise enough, automate enough, outsource enough and streamline enough, somehow everything will become cheaper, quicker and better. That, quite clearly, does not work, because public services are not about managing units and every time we try to squeeze complex human problems into simplistic administrative solutions, we end up paying for it later. We will see this over the next couple of years. We will pay for it more through appeals. We will pay through delays. We will pay through court challenges. If this office is under-resourced, if decisions are rushed and if safeguards fail, millions of euro will ultimately be squandered dealing with the consequences - far more than would have been spent getting it right in the first place. That is why I believe we can do better than this, that we can have a system that facilitates international co-operation, tackles serious crime and allows evidence to move efficiently across borders, but that we can also have a system that is properly resourced, transparent and built on realistic assessments of workload rather than opportunistic assumptions. If this legislation is genuinely expected to deal with hundreds of thousands of requests every year, we should stop pretending that €2.8 million and 30 staff constitute a serious answer to that challenge because we owe the public something better than that. I believe there is a pattern here. We are talking about efficiency. It happened last week in the Dáil during the miscellaneous provisions Bill the Minister brought through where we questioned the fact that we had so many different aspects of the judicial system all contained within the same Bill and the Minister's response was that he was getting a lot done. There is a difference between being in a hurry and having some pace that brings lasting achievement. I have not seen any of it and we will not see any of it in this Bill either.

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