The government plans to issue “at least” 3m public service cards over the next four years, raising concerns that the new “travel pass” which it proposes to give to 640,000 people in 2009 will form the basis of Ireland’s first national identity card.

Documents supplied to companies tendering to provide the public services card state that the Department of Social and Family Affairs (DSFA) will need 900,000 initially rising to 3m in the next four years.

Civil liberties groups are concerned that the free travel card will be turned into a national identity card by stealth.

The DSFA has asked for 5,000 of the cards to be provided for its own staff. It plans to trial chip-and-pin technology, biometric fingerprinting and “contactless” technology — radio frequency identification — on the cards of DSFA employees before rolling out the technologies to other card users.

Although the card will initially be used only for the 640,000 recipients of free travel, the department says, those bidding to produce the card were told that “eventually any service provider will be able to use the card” and that it should be able to “evolve over time”. It also states that some private-sector applications “may also be supported”. Possible uses in the private sphere in the short-term would include turning the card into a proof-of-age card.

A preferred bidder was recently chosen to produce the card after the evaluation of three tenders. The department has acknowledged that it will ultimately replace those cards currently used for accessing services in social welfare, revenue, health, education, agriculture and local government. Civil liberties groups argue that the photo ID and personal information on the cards could form the basis of a national identity card.

Senator Ivana Bacik said the scale of the DSFA’s plans was worrying. “If it is only a travel pass, why do they want 3m? That’s much more comprehensive than we’ve been led to believe. The real worry is that the issue hasn’t been debated in public or in the Oireachtas and there doesn’t seem to be a legislative framework in place to provide the necessary safeguards,” she said.

The basic information on the card will be the Public Services Identity (PSI) dataset, which is linked to the Personal Public Service (PPS) and includes name, date of birth, gender, nationality and “such other information as prescribed by the minister as being relevant and necessary”. The card itself will be similar in appearance to a bank chip-and-pin card. DSFA officials say more legislation would be needed to turn the card into a national ID card. They claim it will improve customer service and cut welfare fraud.

The department has said that budgetary constraints may delay the launch, originally planned for this year but now more likely in 2009. “We have not awarded a contract and we have no made no final decisions yet about how the card will be used or how many will be produced,” a spokesperson said this weekend.

In 2006, the Data Protection Commissioner told a Steering Committee exploring the creation of the card that he had concerns about a single identification number being underpinned with an identity repository.

Niall Barry, DSFA project manager, said the card would be secure because only a small amount of information would be stored on it. But the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) fears that linking the card to potentially dozens of databases could lead to function creep — where information sourced for one purpose is used for another.

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