My Department is fully committed to keeping all personal data submitted by its customers, safe and secure during administrative processes.
It is not possible to provide the number of requests over the past twenty years as section 41 of the Data Protection Act 2018 only came into force in May 2018.
A case management system was instituted in January 2019 to provide more accessible statistics for these type of requests.
There have been 2,198 requests for information under section 41 of the Data Protection Act 2018 since January 2019 to date.
It is not possible to give further information on the details of these requests, as due to the requirement that suitable and specific measures are taken to safeguard the fundamental rights and freedoms of data subjects, my Department is not privy as to why the information is being sought by the public authority. They request information pursuant to Section 41 of the Data Protection Act 2018. It should be noted that in An Garda Siochána, the requests are authorised at Chief Superintendent level.
Prior to January 2019, a manually operated system was in place from May 2018. My Department will be in contact with the Deputy directly on providing statistics from May 2018 until January 2019 as it will take time to manually collate this data.
I can confirm that there have been no complaints lodged by Irish passport holders in view of Section 41 of the Data Protection Act 2018.