Civil-liberties campaigners and a Trinity College Dublin law academic are warning that Ireland is poised to grant police expanded artificial-intelligence powers over biometric data without the safeguards EU law requires. Their concern centers on the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill 2025, which has reached the Seanad’s Fourth Stage, the penultimate stage before a bill is signed into law.
The bill builds on powers already granted to An Garda Síochána. A 2023 act allows officers to record people in public through body-worn cameras and drones, track vehicles via automatic number plate recognition, and tap live third-party CCTV. The 2025 amendment adds what the Irish Council for Civil Liberties describes as a “biometric analysis” power, a three-part capability that would let an investigating officer categorise people based on their biometric data, use that data to identify people whose identity is unknown, and use the biometric data of known individuals to “localise” them. Applied to facial data from CCTV, the group says, that could mean sorting people by characteristics such as ethnicity, age, or gender, identifying a suspect within that group, and then tracking their movements.
The ICCL’s Olga Cronin and Trinity College Dublin’s Dr Róisín Á Costello argue the bill clashes with the EU AI Act, which treats law-enforcement use of biometric AI as high risk. They say the bill narrows the AI Act’s definition of “biometric identification,” limiting it to comparisons against a reference database of named individuals, a “named individuals” requirement they note does not appear in EU law, and that it leaves “biometric categorisation” undefined while omitting the safeguards the AI Act attaches to high-risk systems. The term “localise,” they add, is not defined at all.
Underlying the legal critique is a reliability concern. Facial recognition has repeatedly been shown to encode racial bias and to perform worse on people of colour, and the EU has placed law-enforcement biometric tools in its high-risk category for that reason, a designation whose compliance deadlines the European Parliament recently voted to delay to December 2027. Those same accuracy and bias concerns have led some forces to step back, with Essex Police pausing facial recognition over bias risk.
The critics say a separate Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026 could address some gaps, but not the definitional ambiguities written into the current bill.
Sources: Irish Council for Civil Liberties
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By Ali Nassar-Smith
