Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Luafaidh mé dhá rud le toil an tSeomra. The programme for Government commits to incentivising the shift to electric vehicles and in particular to the publication of an electrical vehicle strategy to ensure we have the necessary charging infrastructure and that it will stay ahead of demand. In Galway, Councillor Albert Dolan is leading the charge, if Members will pardon the pun, to try to get Galway to lead in this area of rolling out the infrastructure. This is, however, something that is needed at a national level. I ask that the Leader inquire as to when the national strategy for electric vehicles will be published and in particular the planning advice to local authorities to ensure we have enough charging points.

On Monday, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, sent a letter to the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy McEntee, about the continual breaches of data privacy by Google in its use of the real-time bidding system. It outlined the research in this area of Dr. Johnny Ryan. For the benefit of Members, real-time bidding refers to how every time a person logs on to his or her phone or other devices, as a number of Members are doing at the moment, Google takes all of their data, including age, location, gender and political opinions. It gathers that data and sells them on to private companies. According to this research, Google is now selling all of our real-time bidding data to 964 companies internationally and it is selling more of our data from more websites to more companies than it was when the Data Protection Commissioner was originally alerted to this data breach by Google two years ago.I raised this as a Commencement matter last week. What I would like is a full debate in this House with the Minister for Justice on the questions of data privacy, digital literacy and the role of the Data Protection Commissioner.