Ms Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield:

I am from the Green group. I thank the committee for meeting us. I will reiterate that, for us, this is not a technical or theoretical discussion. It is about citizens' rights and our data, the data of plenty of people that can be used in a dangerous way. It seems that it is not a matter of much political debate in Ireland but it is in most of our countries. When there are data leaks from one of the big technology companies in Ireland, it concerns a lot of people. They get frightened about a number of their rights because the data then becomes available. That is why we in the Parliament believe this mission to be very important and why we wanted to work on this matter.

Indeed, Ireland is in a particularly ambiguous situation where you have these big tech companies on your soil, which means the Data Protection Commission, DPC, has more responsibility than other data protection authorities. It also means that the data protection authorities will, from time to time, turn to the DPC to ask what it is doing about a particular issue or why it has not acted on it. I think that it is also interesting for the European Parliament to enter into a discussion or conversation with the Irish political world about what competences should remain at member state level, what Ireland feels is sometimes too much of a burden and how we can work on it. With the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, some competences have gone to the European level. I think this is something we can continue to develop, because there are still things that we can invent, create and work on. The European Parliament is not very happy with the DPC. The last time we invited representatives of the DPC to the LIBE committee, they did not attend. Our relationship with the Data Protection Commissioner, Ms Helen Dixon, is not always easy. Perhaps the committee can help to create a better climate for us to work with the Irish DPC. These are areas on which we should really try to work together, and not in opposition.