Ms Camille Loftus:

I do not have examples of good practice because I have not seen anywhere that has done this well. I do think the key is regulation. I do not think we are going to be the ones developing the technology but I do think we have the capacity as a country and as a European Union to say that if the companies want to use these applications with our populations, there are things we are going to require them to have done. They should have to be able to demonstrate how they involved these groups throughout the design process. Our regulators need to engage on a constant basis with a well-supported panel representing different subgroups within the population so they are constantly up to speed. This is moving and changing all the time.

On the investment in education and training, Ireland has done pretty well in some regards. We have made some good progress. We are not telling people how to assess information. That is not happening. That is one of the things we are very vulnerable to. On the point I made around training and education investment, it tends to be focused around the workforce and around children. Some of the most important user groups of AI applications are older people. We are not thinking about that at all. It is a regulatory challenge. We here in Ireland are trying to position ourselves as having regulatory competence in this regard. We have not collectively managed the way digitalisation has happened well so far, in that lots of people feel left behind by it. We need to learn from that and not leave it to aspiration, and require it in regulation instead. We need to focus that regulation around the needs of the end user and not solely around the needs of the producer.