Mr. Séamus Dooley:

There are many challenges facing journalism, regardless of platforms and the greatest challenge is to win back trust that has been lost. It seems to me that one of the ways of securing trust or winning it back is transparency in relation to advertising. While I note the concerns, I do not think in regard to newspapers that this is a real fear. I think the return far outweighs any burden. As a trade union official, I can tell the committee that any mention of regulation of any type is met by a stock phrase which is that this is an additional regulatory burden. It goes with the territory but in this case I think the return in terms of giving people a guarantee of knowing where something is coming from is important.

Going back to the referendum campaign, the real problem about the campaign was the lack of transparency in the spend, people seeing advertisements on YouTube and not knowing where it was coming from. In any election or referendum campaign, robust debates and strong differences of opinion are inevitable and are part of our democracy. The problem arises when one does not know with whom one is debating and one does not know who is funding the debate. My colleague Dr. Foley may wish to add his comments.