James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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We are under the pressure of time, as we must vacate this committee room. Important though this committee is, there are other items of business ongoing.

I have a final question on the legislation. Will Ms Sweeney send her response in writing to the committee secretariat on the questions that she did not get the opportunity to answer? Although we have had a wide-ranging discussion, my final question is on the legislation which is the topic on which we opened our discussion.

I welcome the pilot study from 25 April, which is very positive but every advertiser who opens an account on Facebook and begins to run campaigns, be it political or otherwise, gives details of who they claim to be, and some information about themselves. How hard can it be to put that on a notice upfront? I understand there is an issue with this in respect of issue-based campaigns, because one cannot always detect who they are but, because people to watch their opponents, I wonder how far away we are from this kind of self-regulation and transparency in politics. I get that issue-based campaigning can be difficult and there are grey areas, as we discussed, but as there is some data on the advertiser because they have opened an account and are engaged in commercial advertising, it does not seem that technically difficult to add to the meta data information pane. How far away are we from that?