In the spirit of this being the last sitting day before Christmas, I want to say happy Christmas and thank you to the Ceann Comhairle and my colleagues in opposition and in government. It is a privilege to have served my first year as a TD for Dublin South-West and to work with Deputies on all sides of the House in trying to bring about a better Ireland. I know everyone here is doing it in good faith. It is a privilege to be a part of it. Happy Christmas to everyone. We in the Labour Party have a proud record of supporting An Garda Síochána to do the vital job of keeping our communities safe. Each and every day, front-line gardaí put themselves at risk carrying out the difficult job of patrolling our streets, protecting our public and regularly facing scenes of the most traumatic and difficult nature. Supporting our gardaí in the difficult work of policing cannot just take the shape of nice words, however. It needs to mean giving them the resources, training and support they need to do the job effectively and safely. That means equipping them with the technology and powers they need. However, we must always be conscious of the risks inherent in any expansion of police powers and must work to carefully mitigate, balance and safeguard these against the risks. The Labour Party does not oppose new, useful technologies where they can play an important role. It is important, after all, that our policing moves with the times and is equipped to respond to new threats and do so in an efficient manner. We supported the introduction of Garda bodycams through the previous recording devices Bill in 2023 on that basis. Where proper safeguards are in place, when biases are mitigated and clear guidance is given, new technologies can, of course, help An Garda Síochána, which is all too often under-resourced and neglected, to do its vital work. However, the Labour Party has also been clear about where we must draw the line. We were elected at the last general election on a manifesto that was against the widespread use of facial recognition technology due to serious concerns about the privacy, trust and data protection issues arising from mass surveillance. From the off, we should be clear about what this Bill does and does not do. It would allow An Garda Síochána to carry out biometric analysis, subject to a code of practice to be drawn up by the Garda Commissioner and laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas. This would involve the automated retrospective searching of documents, footage and images that the Garda has obtained in the course of an investigation to categorise or sort the material based on recognisable human characteristics. We are told this will only be permitted in cases of an arrestable offence punishable by five years or more imprisonment, missing persons cases or for the protection of national security. This legislation does not allow for live facial recognition or for identification by comparison to a database of biometric data. On the face of it, therefore, the proposals made in this Bill are reasonably limited in scope. If they are treated with the care the risks here deserve and if they are accompanied by full and proper safeguards and wide consultation on the code of practice, they should not in and of themselves be a huge cause for concern. However, the Government and the Minister have made it clear that they intend this to be just the start. In July of this year, the Minister stated that this first Bill would be followed by "a second piece of legislation that will provide for retrospective and potentially live biometric identification and analysis beyond what is contained in the original Bill." The Minister confirmed his intention to do this earlier today. I was listening to the debate. This raises several issues. First and most importantly, the Government needs to come clean and spell out exactly why the measures in this Bill will not be sufficient. Why does it need to go further with measures that have been shown in other jurisdictions to be deeply flawed and risky? What is the use-case for live facial recognition technology, FRT? Does the Minister intend to develop a national database of faces? Live FRT has serious implications for the right to privacy and the right to protest, and there is also the fact that it is discriminatory in who it targets and isolates. Furthermore, why is the Government taking a piecemeal approach here? Muddying the waters like this risks confusing the debate and hampering scrutiny of this Bill. It is very difficult to have a fulsome discussion of this Bill and its relatively limited provisions with the spectre of far more sweeping changes looming. There is a real risk of function creep inherent in any expansion of police powers and that risk was raised during pre-legislative scrutiny of this Bill. A pattern can often be observed whereby a system is introduced for one purpose but over time, it extends to additional purposes beyond the original intent. The Minister's stated intention to bring forward greater powers in later legislation is in and of itself a brazen attempt at scope creep and it makes it very hard to assess this Bill on its own merits. The many issues with live FRT for policing are well-documented. Some jurisdictions in the US, including Boston and San Francisco, have banned the use of live FRT technology by their police forces. In both of those cases, the city councils moved pre-emptively to put a ban in place before the technology was used by the police in their cities. They took that action because they were aware of the risks inherent in the technology, particularly the risks of making high-stakes errors along racial lines. They knew that using Al systems that have been trained on predominantly white faces makes the risks of misidentification for ethnic minorities unacceptably high. The Boston ban followed a 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, study that found an error rate of 35% for darker skinned women. Of course, technology has advanced significantly since 2018, but the experience of facial recognition in the UK shows that the same issues have persisted. Police forces in the UK have used facial recognition since 2017. They have used it for varied purposes including finding suspects of serious crimes, locating missing persons and event monitoring. They have made much use of both live facial recognition and database-driven retrospective scanning where officers run images of suspects through police, passport or immigration databases to match an identity. In the UK, the police themselves have pushed for the use of these technologies saying they are essential for effective crime fighting and to protect national security. The largest UK police force, the Metropolitan Police, has reportedly made 1,300 arrests using the technology since 2023. The widespread use of live FRT has been criticised by the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, which said that the way the technology is being deployed by the Met is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights protections for the right to privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association. Just this month, a review of the use of facial recognition technology by the UK's Association of Police and Crime Commissioners found a significant "in-built bias". Its review found that "in some circumstances, it is more likely to incorrectly match black and Asian people than their white counterparts" and concluded that the technology had been deployed "without adequate safeguards". Black subjects were significantly more likely to be falsely identified by the technology, with a rate of 5.5% false positives, versus just 0.04% false positives for white subjects. Significantly, that study referred to retrospective rather than live facial recognition. That shows that the high-risk nature of this tech is not limited to live FRT. The system that was examined was based within the UK’s national police database. It is welcome that the Bill reflects the recommendation of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Home Affairs and Migration pre-legislative report that greater clarity was needed on the use of databases. The general scheme of the Bill had been drafted in a way that would allow for comparison to databases, but the joint committee was told by the Garda Commissioner that it was not the intention of An Garda Síochána to run images against a database. The Bill now before us is clearer in making a distinction between biometric analysis, allowed under the Bill, and biometric identification based on databases, which is not allowed. That is welcome. However, he EU’s Prüm II Regulation on police co-operation has been in force since March 2024. That regulation requires member states to establish a national database of the facial images of suspects, convicted persons and, potentially, victims. It also requires the automated searching of facial images between member states. While this legislation does not contain any provision for the establishment of a national database of facial images, it seems clear that this may be coming down the tracks. I would ask the Minister to clarify the Government's intentions on this. Will the Minister be bringing forward proposals for a national database of facial images at some point? If that is the case how will such a database interact with the provisions of this Bill? How will the Minister guard against scope creep if the very limited uses permitted here come up against the temptations of a national database? It is worth noting the words of the Al advisory council in June 2024. It acknowledged that FRT software could significantly speed up investigations and allow for analyses that were previously impossible but it also urged caution, stating: When used in law enforcement, potential efficiency gains must be balanced against the impact on rights. A complex range of harms may potentially occur in deploying FRT including misidentifying crime suspects. Therefore, as recognised in the AI Act, used in a law enforcement context, FRT is a high-risk technology given the potential consequences of its use for individuals. "High-risk" is precisely the term here. Even if error rates in a technology are low, the consequences of an incorrect decision in the criminal justice system are potentially dire. The Government risks playing with fire if it pushes ahead with any plans for a more expansive use of FRT than provided for in the Bill. By August next year, the EU Al Act is scheduled to come fully into force. Article 5 of that Act prohibits the use of live FRT, or real-time remote biometric identification, RBI, except if used by law enforcement for the targeted search for victims of specific crimes or missing persons, the prevention of a threat to life or a terrorist attack or the identification of a person suspected of having committed a criminal offence. This might be a welcome recognition from the EU of the risks in this area, but it still leaves fairly wide scope for the use of live FRT by police forces. It will fall to this House then to guard against any overreach. The Minister, therefore, needs to give us clarity on what exactly his intentions are in this area, beyond this Bill. In any public-facing technology it is essential that public trust is maintained through transparency, accountability and clarity. The Government has recognised this through the seven core principles in the Guidelines for the Responsible Use of Al in the Public Service. Those principles must be at the heart of the code of practice to follow this Bill. Moreover, in the same spirit of transparency and clarity, the Minister must be straight with us on what the Government's future intentions are in this area. A gradual creep of functions and uses will serve only to undermine trust in this technology and even in the institution of An Garda Síochána. Perhaps this is a good moment to appeal to the Government to finally address the plethora of other long-standing issues with An Garda Síochána. Recruitment and retention in the service has become a crisis. Morale remains at an all-time low. We need a sustainable police force to serve communities around this country. Garda leadership have made clear they want the measures contained in this Bill, and an argument can certainly be made that they will help to solve serious crime or to locate missing persons but they will do nothing to put more gardaí on the streets in our communities or to give hard working gardaí on the front line the conditions or pay they deserve. The Government can claim to be on the side of law and order, by expanding policing powers but it is beyond time that the Government finally took the crises facing our Garda seriously and addressed them. Limited retrospective facial recognition, based on existing records not databases, is one thing but live facial recognition or retrospective analysis based on large-scale databases is quite another. The Government must tread very carefully, it must pay heed to the many international examples where this has gone wrong, and it must be honest with the public about its intentions. Our front-line gardaí rely on public trust, and they deserve the support of the Government in maintaining that trust.

Sentiment score: 0.07