Ms Clare McNamara:

On that last question, there is another area of my Department that is involved in discussions on the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act that are under way in Brussels. These discussions are on illegal online content and the Department of Justice would be involved in an interdepartmental group that is looking into that legislation. Other legislation in that area is within the remit of the Department of Justice. The digital unit of our Department, which is not my unit, is engaged in this. On the further enforcement of sanctions, it is important to point out that this Bill is transposing three EU directives, two in full and most of the third one. These were negotiated over a four-year period in Brussels. We, that is Ireland, were very involved in those negotiations as to the enforcement, the sanctions, the rights and remedies of consumers.

It is also important to point out that this Bill has been a long time coming but the Sales Law Review Group, for example, produced a report back in 2011 that talked about Irish consumer legislation being somewhat disjointed and difficult for consumers to navigate and understand. As well as transposing the three EU directives here that very strongly increase consumer rights, we are consolidating existing legislation to make it easier for consumers to access, understand and have everything in one place so that it can be easily found. We are also increasing the enforcement powers, while we are doing this.

EU legislation can be transposed by secondary legislation in accordance with the 1972 European Communities Act or it can be transposed by primary legislation.

If one transposes it by secondary legislation, one has to stick to the scope of the directive rigidly and cannot go outside it. There are some pieces of EU legislation whose scope we could not go outside because we transposed them by secondary legislation. Since we are using primary legislation in this context, though, we can increase the rights because we can go outside the scope of the directives in a way that we were not able to in the past.

The Department has been considering this matter since the sales law review group's report in 2011. We did not produce legislation to consolidate the area because we were waiting to see the outcome of the three EU directives, which ended up taking longer to negotiate than we could have anticipated.

I hope I have answered most of the Deputy's questions.