Mr. George Merrigan:

ComReg manages Ireland's national telephone numbering scheme. Our primary role in this space is the efficient use of telephone numbers and ensuring they are not misused. That has been our focus. We do not have a role, as such, in fraud. With the help of the industry, we have introduced a suite of interventions. We have introduced six interventions so far: five on the voice side and one, so far, on the SMS side. These people prey on people like the Senator's parents, and mine are the very same. We cannot talk about either in isolation; we have to tackle the lot.

The five interventions on the voice side include stopping do-not-originate numbers. Those are numbers that appear on the back of a credit card. You do not receive calls from them because those people never dial from those phones. We have also prevented people cloning number ranges which are not issued by the State. We have introduced fixed call blocking and mobile call blocking from abroad, with the exception of people roaming from abroad, so people will not get calls using Irish numbers from abroad. Most recently, work on the voice side has been focused on the roll-out with the industry of voice firewalls on each network. Since the first of those five interventions was introduced around this time last year, we estimate we have blocked 120 million calls that otherwise would have been delivered to unsuspecting consumers.

The SMS side is a little bit more complicated.

We are working with colleagues in the Department on SMS content filtering, which is used extensively across Europe at the moment. We are looking for a legislative basis by which we could bring that forward. We have already introduced the SMS sender ID registry, which is effectively a way of dealing with messages coming from legitimate users that carry a banner as to who they are, for example, the HSE or whatever. This intervention was introduced last summer and we are still in the first phase of it, which is the banner message warning.