James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I also welcome this Bill, which will bring about the major modernisation of the electoral system. I commend the Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, for his sterling work on this matter since he took office. He has progressed this at pace with the Minister of State in his Department, Deputy Noonan, as well as members of his teams, including Kevin Dillon and others who have contributed significantly in the backroom to putting this legislation together. It is necessary legislation to modernise and reform the entire tapestry of electoral rules and electoral laws with which we as politicians are quite familiar but which the public needs to be more familiar with in the pursuit and participation in our democracy.

I want to pick up on a point that Deputy Jim O'Callaghan made about how democracy can be taken for granted. I believe firmly that it cannot. If we look around the world, there is a threat to democracy emerging. It is interesting that the recent call between President Biden and President Xi Jinping of China on the Ukraine crisis did not touch so much on the immediate events in Europe. They spoke about whether autocracies or democracies would prevail at a global level. It is very much the Chinese view, and possibly the Russian view as well, that autocracies and technocracies will become the predominant form of governance over and above democracies. That is a reality check to all of us in the democratic world. We need to protect freedom and protect democracy. Democracy begins at home and we are doing it today in this Bill.

It is something that we cannot take for granted.

I recently read a great book, Guns, Germans and Steel, which is in the same category as Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankindand similar books about the development of civilisation. A warning is sounded by the author, Jared Diamond, who looked at how technology evolved and at why the Incas, the Aztecs, and the South Sea Islanders lost out and at why the British and Mongolian empires, among others, eventually crumbled. Empires were like a Colossus, conquering all before them but ultimately they collapsed because superior technology came along, whether that technology was steel, shipbuilding, communications technology or the power to vaccinate against infectious disease. In the modern era, data technology is that secret weapon which has been recognised, unfortunately, by hostile actors in many states. We must remain alert to that threat and respond to it and again I commend the Minister and his team for doing so through this Bill. One hunts or one is hunted. Democracy is not about to be hunted out of existence on this Government's watch and I will certainly do all I can to prevent that.

Moving on to the provisions of the Bill, the electoral register has been mentioned several times in the debate already. Anyone who is familiar with the register, which includes most of us in this Chamber, knows of the difficulties with it. In my constituency of Kildare North, which is in the commuter belt, people tend to come and go. They often spend a couple of years in my constituency and then either move back home to other parts of the country or move closer to Dublin and for that reason there are huge anomalies in the electoral register. When people are moving, I often caution them not to de-register at their old address because it is better to have two entries on the register than none. Our registers are not based on reality and we all know that. God love the local authorities, which try their best. They usually have one person in the franchise department who has hundreds of other tasks, trying to manage the register and make it work but struggling badly. The proposal to have an online, centrally maintained register with an authentication system makes huge sense.

Returning to the threats out there, recent elections overseas have brought home the scale of the problem. We saw in the recent UK Brexit referendum the role played by social media and hostile actors, both state and individual. An analysis by the Westminster communications committee of participants in social media debates on Brexit found that two of the top ten most influential Twitter accounts during the course of the Brexit campaign were Russian bots. Two of the entities that were most forensically driving that electoral cycle and debate belonged to a hostile actor outside of the State which certainly did not have the country's best interests at heart.

It is a threat that I flagged in this Chamber in 2017 when I introduced my own Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill, which remains before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport and Communications. I intend to progress that Bill. There is some overlap with this Bill but there are also some stand-alone provisions in it. At the time, the threat was not taken seriously by all sides of the House but we have all seen now that Russian state actors have moved beyond the online space and very much into the physical space. President Zelenskyy told us all about that in the House yesterday and if we needed any further warning, we saw Russian activities off our own coast, in our exclusive economic zone of late. We do not need any reminders of the dangers and the warning I sounded in 2017 is as relevant, if not more so, today. It is not just Russians, of course; threats can come from much closer to home. Every participant in the electoral cycle does not necessarily come with clean hands and it is a threat that we have to be live to in order to protect our democracies.

When I first raised these issues, people asked why Ireland would be threatened. There was talk of little old Ireland, in the corner of Europe, not doing any harm to anybody but that is an outdated and naive idea. Why would somebody want to attack Ireland? There are many reasons. First, we are in the EU and are quite a pivotal state within the Union as we are English speaking. Ireland is a base for many multinational corporations, which goes to the heart of our economic and fiscal policy. Ireland is host to 40% of the EU's data sets and is also positioned in the maritime and aviation approaches to the EU. We are also pivotal in EU-US relations and communications. There are many reasons somebody might want to interfere, not just with our cyber capacity but with our democratic system. Often the approach can be opportunistic, with entities causing mischief because they can. It is not so difficult to do it and those that want to disrupt an EU member state can do so using social media and so on.

Several speakers talked about the position of NGOs. The argument was made that small residents' groups or small campaign groups should not be subject to the provisions of the Bill but I am not sure I fully agree. While I am sympathetic to the arguments made about small groups, and I work with many as a politician, I believe that if any bodies, big or small, with motives that are pure or otherwise, want to engage in the political process, we deserve to know who they are and what they are about. If it is a residents' association for or against a particular development, or for or against a vote at local authority level, in this Chamber or at the European Parliament, we should know. We need to take a broad brush. Who is afraid of transparency? People need to put their best foot forward, let us know who they are and what they have to say and then the electorate can make up their own minds. That said, I do agree that it should not be overly burdensome but I would not exclude certain groups altogether either just because they happen to be small or community based.

The electoral Acts have already been mentioned. When I was researching the Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill, I found up to 40 provisions, primarily in the Electoral Act 1992, that were honoured more in the breech than in the observance and the Repeal the Eighth referendum brought this home. I refer to provisions which hold that a poster put up on a lamp post or a pamphlet put through a letter box must have the director of elections written on it. Most of us involved in elections do that automatically, but many groups do not. Some do not in all innocence, while others do not for more sinister reasons. Recently I have seen posters around the country that read "Repent". I am not sure who put them up or whether they are calling us to worship or to vote in a particular way, although I doubt it. Any communication that has a political motive is supposed to have a label. Again, this came to light during the repeal referendum. Campaigners on both sides erected posters and distributed literature but nobody knew how to make a complaint about the fact that the origins were not properly flagged and the notices which are required under the electoral Acts were not there. Some people went to Garda stations and tried to make a complaint but they were told, quite frankly, by the desk sergeant that he or she did not know what to do. At the time, the Oireachtas committee brought in a range of actors but none of them seemed to know what to do either. There is an enforcement piece and this Bill will include that and it is really important that there is follow through. If people want to make a complaint or raise an issue, it must be clear and easy for them to do so.

I have spoken about the social media piece and I note that in this Bill there is a definition of a transparency notice. It is all about transparency and nothing about censorship. That is in section 119 of this Bill and is carried over directly from my Bill, which I welcome. Perhaps there is more that can be done there and as I said, my Bill remains before the committee.

It is really important to have a rolling electoral commission. In the past, the referendum commission tended to have retired judges and people of great status in society who were extremely knowledgeable in law and matters of referendums but I do not know how knowledgeable they were in modern campaigning techniques, particularly in the black arts. In that context, a rolling agency that is permanently staffed and equipped will have that capacity and I welcome that.

One of the final points is that not all fake news is online. There was a phenomenon during the last general election, and possibly in other elections, whereby literature was put through letter boxes in my constituency and in many other constituencies in Dublin and the midlands in what were very sophisticated operations. When I was out canvassing one night, I came across boxes of black and white literature in the boot of a car. They were manufactured to look like the work of an amateur operation but were the work of what was actually quite a sophisticated and professional operation. When I saw tens of thousands of leaflets in boxes in the boot of a car, I wondered at their origin. What was set up to look like an amateur operation was quite the opposite. I know that colleagues in other constituencies reported the same. As it happens, it was anti-Fianna Fáil literature so one has to ask who benefited from that. In whose interest was it to put out a particular message? Perhaps it was people in tight races in particular constituencies but it was replicated across the country.

We also need to know who has what in terms of assets and spending power. We are all regulated as individual politicians and as candidates in elections. We have the Register of Members' Interests but we do no have a register of political parties' interests, at least to my knowledge. There are parties that have huge property portfolios and significant assets both at home and offshore, as well as huge staffing resources to call upon. We need to know that information. We need to have equality of arms and transparency. I ask the Minister to consider that as an option for this Bill. We need to know and there needs to be a level playing field. Democracy is not for sale and it is really important that we make that point.

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