Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

It is a €25,000 contract with a limited supplier. The justification given in the response from the Department of Education and Skills is that there is a restricted market for this service. I would argue that a couple of transition year students would be able to let it know what the newspapers are reporting or what is on other media. Apparently, the Department of Justice and Equality was deploying officials to monitor what political opponents were saying on Twitter or whatever. It would be useful to know the reason the Department of Education and Skills needs an external media monitoring service and the purpose of it. There might be benign and legitimate reasons it would do so but it is important that we would find out.