Senator John McGahon- speech from 19 Oct 2021
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Transcript
Thank you. Thank you, Carlock. Acting Leader, today I'd just like to talk about the further, I suppose, digitisation of Irish society. And what I mean by that is, particularly in the last year and a half through COVID, we've become more and more of a cashless society than ever before. For example, I don't even carry a wallet anymore. I have my ATM on my card. I would rarely have cash anymore. It's the same for a lot of people right across the board. And when I talk about the digitisation of Irish society, how do we make it more efficient? So two ways that I think we should make it more efficient. I haven't come up with exactly who we have to ask yet. I would definitely take your advice on that. But two ways in which I think we can make it more efficient is, first of all, when people have ATM cards on their mobile phones, they should be able to withdraw money from an ATM cash point if they need it with their actual phone. They're not able to do that unless they have the hard copy. This is something that would aid the digitalisation more of Irish society. The second thing is in relation to IDs, and we see this with COVID certs. So in order to enter any place, whether it's a pub or a restaurant, you need to have your COVID cert. Accompanied with ID to prove who you are in the COVID cert. Again, there's so few people are carrying wallets anymore. No one actually has, very few people actually keep ID physically on them, unless it's a driver's licence in your car or stuff like this. And so the point is, we should also look at introducing variable IDs on people's mobile phones so that you can rock along and you're able to be able to show a straight up driver's licence or straight up passport in a digitised version that is accepted right across the board. Because, you know, to be fair, I wouldn't expect to go up to somewhere and be able to show a photo of my passport or a photo of my ID. So we accept IDs in hard copies, we should be able to now accept it in soft copy. And I think the government should be able to introduce something that's labelled by the government, agreed by the government and can be used right across the mark. And I think the same thing should be done with ATM cards where you can actually withdraw physical money from an ATM bank machine with your mobile phone. Thank you.