Mr. Mark Malone:

There are a couple of things at play. The first is that it was observable to everybody that there was an increase in the intensity of the mobilisations and the fact that they were much more explicitly anti-migrant in terms of language. Over the course of the past 18 months, there was a change in terms of both the intensity and frequency of the arson attempts. There is also a relationship between the places that were identified by small numbers of people. One would imagine that it should have been obvious that the probability of something happening in those buildings would go up once they were identified. Similarly, it is the case that there are more and more arson attacks happening, which would also suggest an increase in the likelihood of that happening. So there are questions in the context of intelligence-led policing. Our understanding is that no arson attacks were interrupted or stopped. They were all either successful or did not happen. There is something there in that sense.

The other aspect relates to stochastic terrorism, which is the idea that when the risk of something goes up, the ability to describe, find or predict any particular incident is challenging. While terrorism may be quite a strong label to put on the arson attacks, what we are talking about is a sort of dynamic situation where the playbook is about going in and whipping up localised hate, telling people that individuals are going to come into an area and sexually abuse their children or women. That is the language they were using; it is not my language. What we saw towards the end of the year was that there was a very increased likelihood that there was going to be an arson attack. There is a dynamic at play.

I totally understand and get the Garda Commissioner's previous comments, which we might hear again later, about the difficulty in ascribing a causal link in terms of an evidence chain. Those two things both coexist together. It is important in terms of the understanding. That is why we refer back to the recommender system, because the systems themselves, the companies, platforms and products are built to centre virality rather than context and accuracy. That is the problem.