Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The first slot is Fianna Fáil's, which I will take. That is not an abuse of the Chair but our standard rota. I see the Chair arriving; he might take a seat and I will continue.

After decades of the Electoral Commission being spoken about, many members were very pleased that this was one of the first legislative items we dealt with. It is very welcome and gives us an opportunity to talk to members of a body with responsibility in this area about the issues we will address today. The fact we are here says a lot. I do not envy the commission the workload but its work is significant.

I will raise the matter of the significant debate that took place during pre-legislative scrutiny, sometimes in private session, on the issue of online political advertising. There was some debate at the time on whether the legislation will, for the first time, facilitate political advertising, which previously had no legislative basis. The fear was there were perhaps not enough safeguards in the legislation to protect some of the concerns people had around online political advertising. At that time, two of the three main platforms, namely, TikTok and Twitter, did not engage in online political advertising. Only Facebook permitted it, which it still does, and, by extension, its platform, Instagram. I should call Facebook "Meta". We are in a very different space now. TikTok continues to ban online political advertising but Twitter, or X, now seems to say it will allow cause-based advertising. Only yesterday, the owner of that platform was in very robust discussions, and I am being polite, with regard to the Taoiseach. There have to be concerns around what safeguards or measures are in place. I say that on behalf of any political party.

There were also a large number of concerns around the use of online political advertising by external actors, and how measures we might have in place here could be integrated into the platform structure that is unique to Irish circumstances. There are powers in the legislation to have take-down notices. There was a fear at the time that they would not be sufficiently quick to manage the significant speed an election campaign operates by. I note the European Commission has put certain obstacles in place in that regard and the Government is to reply. I would welcome an update on that.

The committee believed, and we carried out subsequent research on it, that more work was to be done in the space of online political advertising. It should be an area that the commission focuses on because with the advent of AI, there is now an opportunity for multiple versions of the same ad to be created, posted and rotated. That is a new space. The reason I say that is previously, if a poster, newspaper ad or even a leaflet was taken out, which said, "Older people are my priority", then younger people would make their assessment of that, whereas now, with segmentation, we can tell both older and younger people that they are a priority and we will give them multiples of the same thing. There is no transparency in the argument in the same way. That is very important because we know politics is often about choices and resources. I say all that only to encourage commission members. That is a very significant area they need to look at.

I probably have a more personal view about the next issue but there is a common concern about it, namely, the proliferation of postering. Posters are important, especially for new candidates, for signalling an election and for letting the public know it is time to engage. The proliferation is a significant problem. In a small, three-seat constituency, there might be six or eight candidates, or a European or local election on the same day. The wallpapering that exists around posters is of real concern. Dublin City Council proposed that because it owns the lampposts, it could control what goes onto them. It proposed a regulatory regime that did not get through the council. I urge the commission to examine that issue. I have left Mr. O'Leary very little time to respond. There were more points than questions.