Public Services Card; Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection Regina Doherty
Further to the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and Minister Regina Doherty publishing the Report of the Data Protection Commission on the Public Services Card last week…
And her department’s intention to challenge the DPC’s findings on the card based on “incredibly strong legal” advice…
Dr Eoin O’Dell, a Fellow and Associate Professor at the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, wrote in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post:
The government’s misguided approach has the capacity to do great damage to Ireland’s reputation as a good location for international tech companies to establish their European headquarters.
A government in such open conflict with the DPC [Data Protection Commission] can have no credibility in seeking to ensure that such companies comply with the commission’s decisions.
Worse, it risks fostering the view that a company unhappy with an unfavourable DPC decision could seek government help to resist that decision.
…This is not the first time that government departments have run afoul of data protection laws.
In 2011, the commission found that blood samples from babies’ heel-prick tests were being unlawfully retained, but in 2013 the Minister for Health ordered the HSE not to comply with the commission’s determination.
The Department of Education has continued with its controversial plans, unveiled in 2014, to collect extensive profiles of all children in education and store that data until they turn 30, notwithstanding the commission’s misgivings.
Dealing from bottom of the deck on the Public Services Card (Eoin O’Dell, The Sunday Business Post)
Previously: The Regina Monologues