Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It is just as well I was in the Chamber and listening with interest. I join others in congratulating the Minister of State on his new position.

This is an important piece of work the Minister of State has brought before the House. If it was not as immediately and transparently important prior to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, the need for this legislation is now clear and obvious to everybody. I very much agree with some of the points made by Deputy Ó Ríordáin on the primacy of the state in terms of acting in the best interests of the citizen. There was much in the speeches made by Deputies O'Reilly and Martin Kenny that I take issue with but the common factor is the idea that we need state actors - our State - to be involved in the protection of the strategic infrastructure that benefits our citizenry.

Much of this Bill is about the regulation of dark money. It is often said that sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Really what we are doing here is trying to make sure sunlight is cast on how money is spent within our economy. National borders have become ever more permeable. In capitalism, capital has always flowed but now increasingly, ever more regularly, information also flows. With information flows influence. We see this not just in terms of physical, strategic assets and the buying up of strategic infrastructure but also in the trading of information. Deputy Ó Ríordáin referred to the hacking of the IT systems in the HSE and the massive impact that had. It is vitally important for the protection of the interests of everybody in the State that we know where money is being spent and for what reason it is being spent.

The Higher Education Authority Bill 2022 was a significant piece of work that has passed through the Houses. I spoke to amendments on Committee Stage of that Bill about having transparency as to who is spending money within our third level education system. The State has a very large interest in that, a very clear and obvious interest in terms of the provision of education, but it also has a significant monetary stake. There are other people investing within our third level system and I am not sure we have the clarity or transparency about who is investing and exactly why.

The 2019 regulation was prescient in some ways but we have seen now a resource war within Europe, a war that is being fought with resources. We are seeing it playing out not just in our politics here in this House, where we saw it very clearly during Leaders' Questions today, but across Europe where the energy crisis and the weaponisation of energy are being used as weapons of war by a malign state actor. Increasingly as the climate crisis intensifies and deepens we are going to see resource wars waged across the western world, be that in terms of energy or water. We will see information wars waged as well. I think we would all welcome clarity about where the spend is going, particularly in respect of social media companies and the regulation of media. There is a need for clarity about how that level of information or disinformation, or the control of the flows of information, is having an impact on our democracies across the western world.

I refer to an article in The Irish Times from October 2021 about research work that was done as part of the Pandora papers. The Irish Timesestablished that an empty office in a service building on Fitzwilliam Street Lower in Dublin 2 was the registered address of more than 800 limited partnerships, a type of legal structure designed to allow investors to invest in businesses while limiting their exposure. That is all fine and well, as it is an entirely legal structure. In this case, we saw that the bulk of the limited partnerships registered at this address involved partners based in offshore jurisdictions, set up for clients from Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet countries. The net effect is that the people using the partnerships control an entity that is based in an EU member state while their identity remains completely obscure. That was 800 companies out of one brass-plate office, funded from who knows where and for who knows what reason.

This Bill is a move in the right direction in terms of trying to provide for transparency, to make sure we know what that money is being spent on. I refer back to Article 4 of the EU regulation of 2019. Deputy O'Reilly's view on it was quite jaundiced and probably quite Eurosceptic. However, in some cases a little bit of scepticism about motivation is entirely warranted. I am interested to note that some of the critical infrastructure referred to in that regulation was around electoral infrastructure. We have certainly seen moneys spent in western economies by malign actors to push towards one outcome or another. We should in no way imagine ourselves to be immune from that kind of influence here in Ireland.

I also see critical inputs around energy and raw materials. That has become incredibly obvious to us over the last number of months. To take a forward-facing view, an area we may not pay quite enough attention to is domains around things like artificial intelligence, robotics, cybersecurity, aerospace, and moves towards quantum and nuclear technologies. All of these are very much going to shape our lives in the coming years and in a fairly short timeframe. Who would have thought that mobile phone technology would so completely revolutionise our lives in such a short space of time? We need to be taking actions now to protect ourselves from things like investment in artificial intelligence. There are certainly moves in that direction. I want to make sure that money spent on that type of technology within Ireland is done for the benefit of Irish citizens and the State. The Bill is a useful step in the right direction towards ensuring that transparency.

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