Plans to allow the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) by gardaí will not be included in a new law to bring in body-worn cameras for Garda members, The Irish Times understands.
Fine Gael had been pushing for including FRT in the legislation on body-cams but the proposal met resistance from the Green Party due to civil liberties concerns. The Greens had been arguing for FRT to be dealt with in separate legislation.
Minister for Justice Helen McEntee is now understood to be planning to bring forward separate legislation for FRT. The pre-existing law to allow for body-cams is now set to proceed without the controversial amendment.
Fianna Fáil TD James Lawless, the chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on Justice, said that he now expected the legislation for body-cams to be “rapidly enacted”. He told RTÉ Radio: “Now that it’s been separated from the facial recognition technology issue, that piece of legislation, in its original form, is ready to go and I would expect that will be passed.”
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He said that separate legislation on FRT would be subjected to scrutiny by the Committee on Justice, and stakeholders would have the opportunity to express concerns or views
Mr Lawless said it was “a very complex area” and “we’ll be able to make an informed view as to how we can best then adopt facial recognition technology”.
He said the situation where body-cams was “sort of held up in limbo” waiting for the row over FRT to be resolved “unsatisfactory” and it “makes perfect sense” to take the approach that has been adopted now.
Fine Gael Minister Simon Harris – who took on the role of Minister for Justice while Ms McEntee was on maternity leave – had been trying to get the plan to include FRT in the body-cam legislation over the line in recent months.
The Green Party has previously said it supports the original legislation to allow gardaí to use body-cams but did not support Mr Harris’s plan to amend this to include FRT.
The party said it was not ruling out the introduction of a limited form of FRT, but said it should be done through separate legislation which would then be studied in-depth by an Oireachtas committee. It said that “such a move would allow the existing body-cam legislation to proceed as originally intended while avoiding taking a rushed approach towards the extremely sensitive area of FRT”.
Ms McEntee resumed her role as Minister for Justice at the start of the month and defended plans to bring in FRT at the time. She did not indicate whether she would continue Mr Harris’s bid to use the body-cam legislation to allow for its use. She said at the time that she looked forward to engaging “very closely” with Government colleagues, including the Green Party, on FRT.
“It’s over a year since I received a letter from the Garda commissioner outlining why they need it. This is not for racial profiling. This is not about mass surveillance,” Ms McEntee said, adding that it will not be “live” FRT. She said “this is for the most serious of crimes” and gave the examples of murders, child sexual abuse and abductions.
Ms McEntee said it is about equipping gardaí so that trawling through hundreds of hours of video footage can be “much quicker”. She said: “I really look forward to working with my colleagues in Government but I really want to see this pass for all of those reasons.”
