Ms Liz Carolan:

I will start with the point relating to the ICCL. I know that the issue that the consortium has been pushing for quite some time is that the essential activity civil society engages in has been classified as political, which can have an impact on its ability to receive funding. It takes very serious issue with the definition of issue-based advertising falling under the same realm as electioneering. I am happy to share an initial piece of work with the committee that is coming out of a consortium with which we are involved across Europe and which is looking at whether all advertising should, by default, be transparent and that what we should be looking at is blanket provisions around transparency in advertising and then restrictions for electoral advertising. The question is whether we should have a separate category for the need for transparency around issue-based content as opposed to electioneering content. I am in agreement with the ICCL on that front.

In terms of what the recommendation could look like in concrete terms, I guess this goes to the Deputy's point about the broadcasting regulations as well. As matters stand, the default when new technology is introduced into our online domain is permission. If we think of analogies, for example, in environmental regulation, we use the precautionary principle which is where we say one cannot dump chemicals into the river and if the fish die then we will start to regulate. We say that instead we need to think proactively about the implications of new technology being introduced, in that instance it is in the environmental area, but when it comes to our discourse and to how political discourse takes place.

In response to Deputy McAuliffe's point on whether we wait for the perfect legislation, as it stands, the Bill is 300 pages. It gets into quite excruciating detail around political advertising, nearly to the extent of what the comma-separated values, or CSV, file should look like when the data are published, but there is no mention of voter suppression and having an institution that has responsibilities and a mission to protect both our electoral integrity and, by extension, our national security and giving it powers to apply a set of values on what our electoral system should look like. For example, we were able to introduce the laws that we have around broadcast because the evolution of broadcast was slow enough for us to do so. They were an application of a principle that we have in our legislation, which is that nobody should be able to use the expenditure of money in order to dominate. We looked at TV advertising and we said that is too powerful, we are not going to allow that.

As a result of the fact that legislation cannot keep up, we have basically introduced video ads by proxy. We now have attack ads. One can pay to attack one's rival and say whatever one likes. We are chasing our tails on this legislation a little bit. We are trying to close the stable door. It will require us to take a step back and think about what the structure of an institution which is capable of regulating and protecting electoral integrity in the 21st century looks like. I do not think it looks like the institution that this Bill would create. I think it has to be one which is a genuinely empowered institution to which we say these are the three or five things that we care about in our democracy and we will empower it and give it the research function to be able to assess what is happening.

In 2016, I was speaking in the United States at a big gathering of representatives from electoral commissions from all over the world who were discussing what was happening in terms of the evolution of threats, but there was nobody from Ireland in the room. Everybody was there, namely, the Americans, the British and people from Indonesia, Sierra Leone and Mexico. They were figuring out and discussing how we protect elections but nobody from Ireland was there. When we were doing the project on the referendum which was looking at ads, we found international organisations directly targeting Irish voters to try and influence what was happening. I spoke to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, the Standards in Public Office Commission, SIPO, and I even ended up in the Phoenix Park speaking to the security services after the election just to try to find out whose responsibility it is. In the end it was Facebook and Google that took proactive measures as private companies. I do not want our electoral rules to be set by default in Palo Alto. In the United States, the Supreme Court has said that unlimited expenditure by private corporations to influence the outcome of a referendum is constitutionally protected free speech, whether it is Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United v. FEC or whatever. I have made my point.