Mr. Michael Gubbins:

I will have a go at answering that question. I will come back to what Professor Carthy stated about people having to prove who they are and their identity.

In the nature of the business my colleagues and I are in, people do it on a regular basis, but they use a false identify. No matter what we put in place, people will always find a way around it. We must take this into consideration. It impacts on traceability. From what we have seen in some cases, people will generally create a new account to accommodate some of their criminal activities online. It will not be personal, for example, to Michael Gubbins.

Such people will create a pseudonym when they go online, so there will be no history to support their identification. The Deputy spoke about companies' responsibilities. He is right. I always look at the privileges and responsibilities of those big service providers. They are big companies that make big money and they support a lot of employment, but they have a responsibility to protect citizens and their users, whether in Ireland or abroad. We are here in this room this morning but those companies are not. Some of what we are looking at is a new phenomenon. We need to talk to these companies. The Deputy is right to say that many clever people work for them. We need them to face the issues that have developed as a result of their products. The Deputy spoke about CE marking for cars and other products. Because of how these service providers' applications facilitate us - and it might be one application today but another in the future - we need to be able to identify issues and ask them how they can help and what they can suggest in that regard.

There are competing demands in the area of privacy of data and retaining information. Companies might be headquartered in Ireland but the data for which we are looking might be somewhere else. We then need to use mutual legal assistance treaties to get those data. It can take a while to get through that process and, when the request is responded to, the data might not be there so the next step might not be available to us. As a result of GDPR and so on, it is less likely that data will be available to help us with our investigations. As Detective Superintendent Ryan said earlier, time is of the essence. There is probably an opportunity for Ireland to take the first step in working with these bigger companies to find solutions as many of them have headquarters here. We need to push it out, rather than looking outside and bringing it in. Let us start at home first.