The Irish government is planning to bolster its police's ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use.
The Communications (Interception and Lawful Access) Bill is being framed as a replacement for the current legislation that governs digital communication interception.
The Department of Justice, Home Affairs, and Migration said in an announcement this week the existing Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulation) Act 1993 "predates the telecoms revolution of the last 20 years."
As well as updating laws passed more than two decades ago, the government was keen to emphasize that a key ambition for the bill is to empower law enforcement to intercept of all forms of communications.
The Bill will bring communications from IoT devices, email services, and electronic messaging platforms into scope, "whether encrypted or not."
In a similar way to how certain other governments want to compel encrypted messaging services to unscramble packets of interest, Ireland's announcement also failed to explain exactly how it plans to do this.
However, it promised to implement a robust legal framework, alongside all necessary privacy and security safeguards, if these proposals do ultimately become law. It also vowed to establish structures to ensure "the maximum possible degree of technical cooperation between state agencies and communication service providers."
The government said it will follow the EU Commission's (EC) roadmap for law enforcement data interception, including a section on encryption issues, which it published last year.
"There is an urgent need for a new legal framework for lawful interception which can be used to confront serious crime and security threats," said justice minister Jim O'Callaghan, announcing the news.
"The new legislation will also include robust legal safeguards to provide continued assurance that the use of such powers is necessary and proportionate.
He said new legislation is "long overdue", following "significant changes" to digital comms over the past twenty years that "existing legislation does not comprehend."
Ireland will also take the EU's lead on spyware, establishing a legal provision for its use, only in cases of strict necessity.
The EC's 2024 paper [PDF] examining the legality of spyware noted it could be used by member states, but only where situations absolutely require it. Programs must be used proportionally, with a judge's approval, and with stringent oversight.
The justice ministry said it would take this paper into consideration when developing Ireland's legal provision for using spyware. Example cases could include accessing data on a device or network, or covert recordings of communications on a device, or over a network, the government said.
In addition to spyware, Ireland is looking to establish a legal power for police to scan electronic equipment in a specific location to identify people of interest and their associates in relation to serious crime investigations. Examples of this technology in action include police camping outside a single location, and operating IMSI catchers to identify those inside.
Olga Cronin, surveillance and human rights senior policy officer at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), said the nonprofit "has very serious concerns about this shopping list of surveillance powers," despite the proposals still being in their infancy.
"These are surveillance tools and powers of extraordinary reach, with sweeping implications for people's rights and freedoms, and come in the context of An Garda Síochána already expanding their 'eyes and ears' via the Recording Devices Bill," Cronin added.
The separate but related Recording Devices Bill was introduced in December 2025, proposing expanded police use of biometric recognition technology.
It did not say exactly how this would be implemented, but ministers describing the Bill's ambitions suggested that both live and retrospective facial recognition could become widely used across Ireland's police force.
"Once powers of this magnitude are normalised, the damage to rights and freedoms can be extremely difficult to reverse," said Cronin.
"We must also remember that measures introduced for exceptional or serious crimes tend, over time, to be used for much less serious crimes because there is institutional pressure to use them more frequently. What was once exceptional becomes routine." ®