Mr. Art O'Leary:

There is a lot of legislation that covers disinformation and misinformation. There are a lot of stakeholders and actors in this space. Coimisiún na Meán is the biggest player. It looks at the entirety of the online world 24-7, all the time. Our role in respect of disinformation and misinformation is purely in the context of election campaigns. It relates to the three weeks. Once the polling orders have been signed and the elections have been called, that is when our role kicks in and it is specifically to do with the area of electoral information. It is a focus. We are a very small subset. Obviously, we will be working very closely with Coimisiún na Meán regarding the work it must do. Its brief is so much broader than our brief because it is concerned with issues like child protection and all the other areas of online safety and it is equipped to deal with that. We have a very close working relationship with it.

I am happy each of us is aware of our own roles within this space and I am sure we will be leaning on each other for experience and advice with regard to challenges that may inevitably arise.

I agree entirely on the ballot papers, by the way. Unless you work it out in advance, it is almost impossible to know which proposal is which. It is in the name of the Bill on top of it, which is why we put copies of the two ballot papers as they will appear in our information booklets. There is “family” in the name of the Bill on the family one in white and there is “care” in green in the name of the Bill on the care one. However, a person has to pay some attention to what that is because it is not immediately obvious. We have a research programme and we are currently looking at areas for further research and I suspect ballot paper design will probably come up, not just for referenda but also other electoral events. People whose names begin with A, B and C are obviously pleased with the current way of going alphabetically. The academics have been claiming for years that we should randomise those and so on, so there is a wider question to be dealt with there. It is something we are conscious of because it is the thing people are confronted with. On 7 June, the people of Limerick will walk into a polling station and be handed four separate ballot papers. This is difficult. We need to explain to people what it is they can look at. People who are not citizens of this country will get a ballot paper for their local elections and the directly elected mayor but nothing else. We need to explain to people what they can expect when they go into a polling station.

I should probably give a shout out to Joe Duffy and his show. They did an extraordinary piece of public service work when they looked at the electoral register issue. I am happy to clarify that when new people check the register and try to register themselves online, they must put in their PPS number. However, if one does not want to put in one’s PPS number, there are alternatives. People can go through a local authority and complete a form and will be registered.

We are encouraging people – no more than that – to include PPS numbers, dates of birth and eircodes because there is a project under way in the Department of housing and with the local authorities to create a single database. When people talk about the electoral register, people think there is one big register. We have 28 separate registers in this country and they do not talk to each other. We are good at putting people on the register but sometimes not so great at taking people off. If you live as an 18-year-old at home in Kerry, go to college in Dublin, do your master’s in Limerick and then get a job in Waterford, it is likely you will appear on four or five different electoral registers. The job of encouraging people to use a single, unique identifier is to eliminate these duplicates. In a couple of years time, I am hopeful our electoral register will be bulletproof or at least much better than it is. We have a responsibility as An Coimisiún Toghcháin to have oversight on the accuracy and completeness of the electoral register. It is a huge project and a significant priority for us, and we are taking it seriously.

Joe Duffy was absolutely right to highlight the issue. He mentioned my name a couple of times and I am happy to endorse it. I think he revisited the issue again today but, luckily, I am speaking to the committee, so I am not available to Joe. It is a decent piece of work. For all the confusion and concern on that particular issue on that particular day, 4,500 people checked the register afterwards and updated their details after having heard Joe Duffy. Every cloud has a silver lining, as did my particularly cloud, because we are looking for a register we can stand over.

On the Unified Patent Court, the Deputy is probably right. We have a challenge here. Because the intention is to have the referendum on the same day as the local and European Parliament elections, I think people will turn out anyway. If it was a stand-alone referendum, I probably would have concerns. The Bill was published just last week. We have already ordered the paper to prepare the information booklet for people. We will start on the design in the next week or two. Much of that work will be done before we have even finished with these referenda on 8 March. The process for how we treat the referendum – the information campaigns – will be exactly the same. We will not be treating it any more or less seriously than we have treated the others. It is a proposal to change the Constitution. It is an important matter and we will treat it seriously.