Donohoe ordered that PSC system be used

The Department of Children and Youth Affairs was ordered to make the public services card (PSC) the only way for people to access the new National Childcare Scheme as it did “not make sense” for the department to be allowed to develop its own application system.

Public Expenditure and Reform Minister Paschal Donohoe said his department had dramatically ordered that an alternative application method be scrapped because allowing the Department of Children and Youth Affairs to incorporate its own online system would serve to spend “taxpayers’ money on two different systems to do the exact same thing, where one reusable, legal and secure alternative exists”.

He said the new scheme’s use of MyGovID, the online face of the controversial card, “is Government acting in a joined-up manner”.

While roughly four million cards have been issued, fewer than 10% of them have been verified for MyGovID, a process requiring verification of a person’s phone number and which is a prerequisite for those hoping to apply for the new scheme.

The scheme, which has been three years in gestation, was set to launch on October 29, but has now been delayed until November 20 after a “snag” was detected in pilot system tests regarding applications from families of four or more children.

The Irish Examiner previously revealed that the department had intended to launch the scheme using a secondary online applications portal surplus to the public services card, only to be told not to do so by the office of the Government chief information officer, a subset of Public Expenditure, in January 2018.

“I will not allow taxpayers’ money to be directed into the building of redundant infrastructure in this area”, Mr Donohoe said, in response to a query from Anne Rabbitte, Fianna Fáil’s spokesperson on children and youth affairs, as to why his officials were “opposed” to an alternative application method.

This stance is at odds with those taken elsewhere in government, however, such as in the case of the Revenue Commissioners, which allows MyGovID as one of many methods for accessing its services.

The use of the PSC as the only means of accessing the National Childcare Scheme has meanwhile now drawn the attention of the Data Protection Commissioner, which recently ruled that to use the card for any services other than welfare benefits is illegal.

While Social Protection Minister Regina Doherty has said she will fight the commissioner’s rulings on the PSC in the courts, the vast majority of State bodies have since rowed back on their mandatory requirement for people to hold the card, with the Department of Children and Youth Affairs now being the main outlier to that trend.

The commissioner, Helen Dixon, wrote to the Department of Children in early October asking for confirmation that MyGovID would be the sole means by which people could apply for childcare subsidies, something the data protection commissioner said “cuts across the findings” of her report.

She also requested the legal basis for the department employing MyGovID, and the data-protection impact assessments carried out on the scheme. A response was received to that letter from Department of Children and Youth Affairs last Thursday, the data protection commission said.