Ms Becky Bristow:

I thank the Chair and the committee for having us here today and I thank the Senator for her questions. To answer them very directly, yes, this technology is possible. It is available and is used by the Government in other ways, for example, in the context of car registration. To verify a car, its source and what exactly it is, all one has to do is type the registration number. Plenty of stakeholders are able to access a database to verify whether details put up on an online platform are true. The online platforms are also able to do the verification up front, which is what we would want.

I will say at the outset that the legislation the Department brought out last year is actually very good. It was very well thought out. If it is enforced and underpinned by traceability, we will be in a very good position. We are not often in a position to do something that will be game-changing for consumers, criminality and animal welfare. That is why we are today, to ask the committee to empower and fund the Department to put in a verification and traceability system. These systems already exist in other parts of the Government. This is not brand-new technology and it is very doable. It is not acceptable to rely on public or private selling platforms to do all the work. The reality is that enforcement has to come from the powers that actually put out the legislation.

To answer the Senator's question very directly, it is absolutely possible to have a single database of breeders and verification of microchipping. We are very lucky in Ireland that we only have four microchipping databases. The UK has a multitude of databases, which makes it much more difficult. All we need to have is a piece of plug-in technology to verify if a microchip is real and whether the details match those of the dog that has been put online for sale.