Mr. T. J. McIntyre:

The Deputy's point on education is a very important one and these committee hearings are a very important aspect of educating people in general by bringing the issue to public awareness. He asked what would be one or two points where we could foresee change. First, the problem is largely not one of existing laws but one of access to those laws and access to justice. It is important that people have mechanisms available to them which do not require them to spend several thousand euro on a trip to the High Court for, for example, a Norwich Pharmacal order. One of the best ways in which people can exercise their right is through the Data Protection Commissioner's office which, as we have seen, is rather underfunded.

Second, with regard to the Garda computer crime investigation unit, investigations in this area are necessarily very often cross-border and necessarily very often technically intensive. For example, they can require looking at the contents of laptops and technical evidence. A problem in this regard is that, in many cases, these are not very complex matters that should be handled out of Harcourt Street and, for the most part, should be handled at the local Garda station level. However, it is the need for specialist expertise that imposes a bottleneck. If we were to see greater funding for the computer crime investigation unit, we would help to address that particular bottleneck.