Dr. Theresa Reidy:

I will start with Deputy Barry's questions and will also refer to examples. Ireland is pretty unusual in Europe in not having a permanent study. Nearly all of the new and old member states of the European Union do this. There are different models and ways of doing it. Finland is a very good example where the funding is managed by the Ministry of Justice because it is responsible for handling the electoral process. A tender is put out and a consortium of political scientists - usually based on all of the universities in Finland - tender for it. That is how it is funded.

This comes to the point made by Senator Grace O'Sullivan about the independence and integrity of the study and to manage it in that open and transparent way, perhaps through something like an electoral commission. The Irish Research Council has partnered with Departments and the Constitutional Convention in various ways and carries out that process. The funding has come from Departments but the actual management of the process and the recruitment of the researchers has been carried out by the Irish Research Council. Effectively that is what the council does all the time. It has all the processes and procedures in place to ensure the integrity of the process and it has lots of international peer reviews and evaluation. That would be one way of guaranteeing the independence and integrity of the study.

Austria is another good example of how to manage the process. It has a very well run and well-funded study. Switzerland might also be interesting from Ireland's perspective because - strangely enough - the referendum study has a higher priority than the election study and a lot more money is allocated to the referendum study. Switzerland has a very interesting procedure for doing that. We could also give examples and highlight some data from there.

Reference was made in the questions to how the study changes in involving people. I shall give some concrete examples that may be useful for the committee about what kinds of questions we ask and why we ask them. In 2011, for example, we asked lots of questions about political institutions and people's views on the Dáil, the Seanad, political parties and public representatives. We asked lots of questions about how and why people engaged with their public representatives and on what kinds of topics. This is the information we imagine would be of interest to all political parties and also to people from no political background.

Another element that is worth mentioning is social media. We started to ask many more questions about that in 2011 and again in 2016. We asked about what kinds of information people get from social media, whether or not they trust social media and how they use it during political campaigns and whether it is different to when it is outside the political process. In tandem, there is a public consultation process taking place separately that is looking at the role of the online digital media and how it interacts with our democratic processes. This is part of a global debate that is happening. It was discussed on Facebook by Sheryl Sandberg yesterday. We have some data on there but they are quite limited. One would imagine that this is part of the election study that will grow and become more significant in understanding how digital media interacts with our democratic process.