Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

On the Minister of State's earlier response on door-to-door collections, an issue I have come across in the past and of which all of us have had experience, is that of commercial organisations contacting us about selling advertisements.

A prime example of that would be in a school journal. This purports to be of benefit to a particular school where the companies are acting on behalf of the school. It is not just schools but charities as well. Effectively, all they are is brass-plating a commercial operation and when you explore in detail by contacting either the school or the charity, they are getting a nominal fee to have their name associated with a particular commercial operation. Is there a mechanism to ensure that where a commercial business involved in a commercial operation is stating it is acting on behalf of a particular charity, it is obliged to clarify how much of that contribution is going towards the charity? For example, there are many radio ads at the moment where if you make a donation towards Ukraine or a famine in Africa, it is clearly stated a minimum of €2 of your text message contribution is going to this particular organisation. There are commercial companies that are operating on that basis, that is, selling advertising in particular publications, whether it be calendars or diaries and so forth, where there is no indication being given and when you delve into it, the proportion of the contribution actually going directly to the organisation is minimal.