Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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That is fair enough. I am signalling an area at which we would like Mr. Deering to look. I welcome his comments that he will take that matter under consideration. It also seems strange to me that public bodies go to great lengths to gather data. They get those data, collate them, clean them and prepare them in a publishable format, but often they do not maximise this by bringing all the different data sets together. It is fine if a person knows where to look and where to go and all the rest, but we do not have joined-up data in this State. A concrete example of this would be the public procurement data on etenders.gov.ie. If these data were connected to other publicly available data, for example, company information contained in the Companies Registration Office, CRO, ownership data in the register of beneficial ownership, court data such as judgements, bankruptcy, and data published by the Central Bank on disqualified directors, it would make it far more accessible to the public in relation to information.

We have a new data sharing service Act that was passed but has not yet been enacted. We know the Government got money from the recovery and resilience fund from the EU that will go towards a shared government data service centre. Many companies in the private sector are already creating this service for individuals. They are using the public data sets that are available in different places and doing as I suggested. Should the State not also be doing this kind thing? It does the heavy lifting but does not reap the benefit. We got frustrated in Leinster House. We could not access kildarestreet.com. I do not know if the site was down or if it was blocked here or whatever. The Oireachtas has its own website, but most Deputies use kildarestreet.combecause it is more user-friendly, and it is not publicly funded. The point is that the information is available but it needs to be collected, joined together and presented and made available to the public in an easy to use way. Is this something that Mr. Deering, as the Information Commissioner, would look at not just in making the data sets available but joining them and, crucially, making them available in an easy to use format that is searchable and accessible to the public and that you do not need a masters degree to figure your way around it.