Mr. John Carroll:

With regard to the crossover of information from a resigned Oireachtas Member or any public representative, we would not in any way facilitate such an action. I draw the Senator's attention to the letter the Oireachtas gives to all outgoing Members when they resign, which states: “Outgoing Members are also reminded that personal data which was given to them by constituents may not be transferred to third parties without the consent of the data subject.” That is what the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission tells Members and we would not in any way try to go around that.

The other bit that is important is that we did not say we had a central electoral register or central marked register. I want to be clear that what I said was that we maintain copies of the individual ones we receive from the clerk, but we do not in any way merge, export, scrape, optically scrape or anything of that nature to bring them into some other format.