Gardaí will for the first time be given the power to use facial recognition technology to identify suspects of serious crimes.

Justice Minister Helen McEntee is seeking cabinet approval to authorize the use of special software to catch child killers and predators, as well as to exclude innocent people from investigations.

Ms McEntee is also expected to tell Gardaí today that national security and public safety must trump the right to privacy in certain cases.

The move is likely to raise concerns among civil rights groups, although the legislation includes safeguards to ensure full compliance with human rights, GDPR and data protection laws.

The purpose of the legislation will be to help the gardaí investigate cases of murder, child exploitation and missing persons.

Facial recognition software is already in use by a number of crime-fighting agencies, including police departments in the United States and the Metropolitan Police in London.

Ms McEntee is due to address the Garda Representative Association (GRA) annual conference today in Westport, Co Mayo.

She is expected to tell delegates that she cannot agree with people who are calling for a ban on technology that allows the identification of a person in investigations.

In her speech, she should also say that there are occasions when the interests of public safety, crime control and national security must outweigh the right to absolute privacy.

The technology is used by the Metropolitan Police to help locate people on watch lists wanted by investigators as a real-time aid to prove whether someone has provided false or misleading details or as a retrospective system to establish the someone’s identity.

The Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Bill, formerly known as the Digital Recordings Bill, is expected to reach the second stage of the Dáil by the end of next month. It is hoped that it will be enacted by the end of the year and will allow the introduction of body cameras.

Ms. McEntee will also seek approval to include measures regarding facial recognition as committee amendments to the bill.

She is expected to tell the GRA conference that the powers needed to record CCTV must be accompanied by limited powers to search and process those recordings effectively and efficiently.

Facial recognition technology could be used to identify a suspect that gardaí already have a picture of without sifting through thousands of hours of CCTV footage.

These automated searches will take investigators minutes, compared to the laborious process of reviewing individual footage.

It is hoped that this technology will also help prove a person’s innocence in situations where they are suspected of a crime but are proven to be in another location.

The technology is already being used in child exploitation cases by agencies such as Europol, Interpol, the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Safeguards in the legislation will include a full human rights and data protection impact assessment.

Ms McEntee is expected to insist that it will not be used for indiscriminate surveillance, mass data collection or racial profiling, but rather will be used to support the gardaí in clearly defined circumstances.