Francis Noel Duffy (Dublin South West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their contributions and for coming in at short notice. For public information, fees associated with marked registers are for the compiling of the register are nominal.

It is public information. This Bill is important to us, especially to members of this forum. In recent years, as noted earlier, we have seen the unethical use of social media platforms to microtarget constituents to affect election results in the UK and the US. We cannot allow this type of political engineering to take place in Ireland where constituents are not aware they are being targeted subtly. The main purpose of today's meeting is to allow discourse on this matter and to inform us on how this type of behaviour can be cut out of Irish politics. I hope the eventual outcome of this process will be legislation that legally prohibits unethical data processing.

My question for Deputy Ó Broin is, considering he is not the data officer for the party, who briefed him in advance of this hearing? Is there someone in Sinn Féin who has intimate knowledge of organisational matters and practices within the party who went through things to help the Deputy to prepare for this meeting? I am not looking for his or her name, but if there is someone who helped the Deputy to prepare, will he tell us why this person was not asked by his party to represent it?