Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. O'Leary back to his old bailiwick, where he was a distinguished public servant, and also his colleagues. For clarity, the Electoral Commission is a brand new organisation. Can Mr. O'Leary give us an indication of the Electoral Commission's current staffing and the allocation of those staff to the various tasks? It seems that under the Act, the Electoral Commission has a myriad of tasks and I wonder how many people are working on each.

The focus of our debate today is obviously ensuring the integrity of the upcoming European elections, in particular. As the Joint Committee on European Union Affairs, that is our job. We have already had discussions in Europe with colleagues there in relation to this.

Mr. O'Leary stated that sections to the Act that are germane to our discussions, Parts 4 and 5, have not been commenced yet. That is something we can take up directly with the Minister. The committee might ask the Minister if these sections will be commenced in advance of the upcoming European Elections and I propose we discuss it later.

It seems a lot is put back on the individual to do the fact-checking. My experience across Europe and elsewhere is that a lot of people now go in search of "facts" that compound their own prejudices and disseminate those as facts if they can find any source, reliable or otherwise, to underscore that. Is it An Coimisiún Toghcháin's role or Coimisiún na Meán's role to say, "This is a falsehood", during the course of an election? I know broadcasters sometimes do fact-checking of political statements and so on but it really is important in the current context because I am afraid both domestic and foreign actors have interfered with other elections. We would be naive in the extreme to believe we will be immune from that. I have no doubt we already have been impacted by that.

Another question I have is around what sort of liaison An Coimisiún Toghcháin has with like-minded organisations in other European countries so that there is a pan-European approach to misinformation or the undermining of viewpoints and policies in the course of an election.

My final question is about the experience we saw emerge after the Brexit referendum, namely, the role of Cambridge Analytica in harvesting data and targeting particular subsets of the electorate for misinformation. Does An Coimisiún Toghcháin have any role in combatting that sort of organised manipulation of public data, that is, the electoral register?