Ms Liz Carolan:

I might jump in there. I will also address Senator Cummins's point about the archive that, say, Facebook and Google have at the moment. It sometimes feels to me as if the people who are trying to do the right thing, fill out all the forms and give their phone numbers and all those kinds of things are the ones who end up in the archive. They then see quite a lot of other activity and they do not know from where it is coming. It can be spreading misinformation or connected to someone else and that is not being captured. That is why we need transparency provisions, at a minimum, across all the advertising. That way, we can see it all and journalists can dive into it so that we have a sense of what is going on.

To reply to a specific point made by the Senator, Facebook's advertising archive was built for the US and its laws where a group can be financed to support a candidate's election campaign and that does not count towards the candidate's spending limits because there are none, or they work differently. That archive has not been designed for Ireland and its laws. We should require those platforms to give us all the information that we need, including who is spending money, how much is being spent, what people are saying, where they are saying it and who they are saying it to. We need to ensure that our electoral commission is able to look at that information. It can then assess that against the spending limits and identify that, for example, there are five different campaigns going on for one particular candidate and that goes above the limit. The electoral commission needs to have the power to be able to do that and the platforms need to release the information to allow that to happen.