Mr. Art O'Leary:

There are a lot of interesting questions there. I will start with the easy one. On the electoral register, the intention is to eliminate duplicates wherever they occur. There will be a single database and if we have dates of birth and unique identifiers, such as PPS numbers, these will be flagged immediately. The local authority will go to the person and say it has two addresses for him or her, and ask where he or she is ordinarily resident and where that individual would like to register to vote. The whole idea is to eliminate the duplicates. It is a three-year project. The fact we are having so many electoral events this year and next year will slow down some of the work in transferring everyone because we do not like to mess with the electoral register close to an electoral event, just in case. We have to make sure there is sufficient security to retain the integrity of the register. So much good work has been done by the local authorities in the past couple of years to "clean up" the register, as they see it. Again, more work needs to be done. Some counties and local authorities are better than others. I will not, under pain of death, reveal who I think is good and bad at this because we need to look at it in its entirety.

On the meeting with the tech companies, I found them to be positive because they outlined the process by which they would deal with misinformation and disinformation. They then gave us access to talk to senior people in the organisations, at speed if need be. We flagged the issue of the need for speed during an election campaign. Each of them has an individual process to go through. If we go to the companies and say such and such a thing is clearly wrong and here is the evidence why, they have someone to take a look at it, say it is wrong, and take it down. I cannot say whether that will take ten minutes, two hours or ten hours. We do not know, but we will know based on experience. It will be part of our post-electoral event review to hold everybody to account for the promises they made in advance of an election campaign but-----