Mr. Barry Lowry:

I think the Deputy is right. The underlying principle that the Commission is using is that regulation can be used to try to moderate the behaviour of commercial companies and multinational commercial companies. There may be some areas where we need to own the identification process ourselves and that is where we can maximise control and assurance. That principle is absolutely right. Then there is the challenge of how you open that up and in what way. We are seeing it in Ireland with our own electronic identity, where it is only used for public services but people are asking why they cannot use it for banking or things of their choice. That is reasonable. We are moving into the next iteration of the digital world, which is the individual understanding it better and wanting control of it, and wanting to see what a company does with a person's data, such as an airline when a person books a flight online. People might ask if the airline is doing something that it is not entitled to. GDPR and all of these things are all layers of the same underlying principle, which is that no one should know anything about a person unless entitled to for the purpose of that transaction and the individual should always have control over what those transactions are, when they stop, and when data are deleted.