Every day that body camera legislation is delayed means an increased risk to gardaí, the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors (AGSI) has said.
AGSI General Secretary Antoinette Cunningham said the use of bodycam is not a blanket power being sought and will only be used in very selected and specific circumstances, such as serious crime like threats to national security.
Her comments come after the Green Party said that while it fully backed original legislation to allow gardaí access to bodycams, it would not support a call from Minister for Justice Simon Harris to support legislation which would pave the way for gardaí to use facial recognition technology (FRT).
Green Party TD Patrick Costello said it is important to make a distinction between bodycams and FRT, which he said is flawed and not reliable.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, he said that "it has been shown in other jurisdictions to have gender biases, to have racial biases, to simply get things wrong and to leave innocent people being dragged through the courts."
Mr Costello said the Department of Enterprise and the Government Chief Information Officer are leading a cross-departmental working group looking at principles around the proper and ethical use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and we have to wait for them to complete that work.
He said the passing of the European Union AI Act "will have a huge impact on this and there's no point legislating here until that has come through."
Speaking on the same programme, Ms Cunningham said that "garda assaults are on the increase" and that bodycams are "a basic level of protection that is needed".
She said: "Every day that this legislation is delayed, there is an increased risk to An Garda Síochána and that is not acceptable."
Fine Gael Senator and barrister Barry Ward said the proposal is that the technology will be used to search for a specific image from hours of footage that is recorded and will not be used as a live stream.
There are two important qualifiers, he said, the first is that it is not proposed to be used in real-time where a notification is received when a face is recognised, and also whatever it finds the result still has to verified by a garda.
"The guard would still have to approve that that image is correctly what the technology tells him or her that is. And then obviously if it's used in a trial, it will further be put through the hands of a jury who would have to be satisfied that it is what they say it is."
Also speaking on Morning Ireland, Mr Ward said that bodycams will be used to record footage, but it is not proposed that FRT would be used in a live environment with the bodycam on a garda.
In relation to privacy issues, he said that any algorithm is as flawed as the person who designs it, "so it's no more or less flawed than a garda who might be sitting through footage".
He said it is important to acknowledge that there are places where it has not worked, as for example in San Francisco, "but it was used in real time", which will not be used in Ireland.
The senator said that facial recognition technology is already in use by the Department of Social Protection, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Europol.
He said that while there may be some false positives, its successes are shown with Interpol identifying seven child victims of abuse every day through FRT.
He said it is not perfect but no system is.
"But the important thing is that if there's a false positive, the guards still have to approve that that is correct. We don't accept the technology as the last word. It still has to be put through a human sieve of somebody who looks at that and decides that it is correct".
