Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I have not seen him since his appointment to his current role. I wish him the best in that regard.

I join with all Senators across the Chamber in welcoming the Bill. Online commerce has been with us for about a decade and a half and it has been very much the wild west with regard to consumer protection. Therefore, we welcome the Bill as an important and comprehensive step in protecting consumers in terms of online transactions. The merits of the Bill have been well articulated so I will cut to questions and concerns I have on its scope.

The first issue is the resourcing of the CCPC and ComReg in the enforcement of the new legislation that will be in place.While we have, by and large, well-established custom and practice for the bricks and mortar retail sector, there is much greater variability online and that has been proved by the queries that come into our offices. There will be a much greater requirement to have strong resources and for the CCPC to be well resourced to deal with the volume of queries that will be forthcoming, especially in the early years after the Bill is enacted. I would like to hear from the Minister of State on that.

The second element is where the online transactions take place. As I understand it, this is a Bill transposing an EU directive and which applies to commerce and online transactions taking place in this country. However, there is a fundamental question surrounding transactions on websites that purport to be located within this State but are actually located outside it.During the Second Stage debate on the Bill in the Dáil, Deputy Sherlock cited figures stating there are 309,953 .iedomains in existence. He added that "Only 278,042 of those are based in the Republic of Ireland, while 4,532 are based in Northern Ireland". Then there are 31,911 .ie domains located elsewhere. The question about the 36,000 domains located outside the Republic of Ireland is where the consumer rights of those who purchase good and services from them stand. I have had a number of people come to me and say they thought they had the security, safety and assurance of buying on a .ie domain only to then be hit with UK customs charges, goods going missing or fraud taking place. Those people have no recourse and it is not apparent they will have any under this Bill. If that is the case, then there is a large part of the jigsaw missing in the strengthening of online consumer protections.

I note the Minister of State's predecessor, Deputy Troy, responded in the Dáil that this was a matter for the Minister with responsibility for communications as it concerned regulation of .ie domains, but frankly, that is not good enough. We cannot have a Department talking about consumer protections and then pushing the regulation of the domains where the commercial activity takes place to another Department. We need to have joined-up thinking here. We are looking for a response from Government. If it cannot be from one Department, then it needs to come from two of them but we need a Government response on where the .ie domains stand. It is, as I said, the missing piece of the jigsaw where consumer protection is concerned, especially as people think they are buying within the Twenty-six Counties and sometimes they are not, unbeknownst to them.

My last point is on redress. There is now a strong range of redress options available in the event a good or service purchased online is not what it purported to be, those options being the right to refund, repair and exchange. However, there is an issue with the options provided to a consumer and especially the expectations about how long an electronic product or service should be expected to last. My colleagues Deputies Sherlock and Kelly submitted an amendment on Committee Stage in the Dáil to ensure consumers can rely on the products they buy to last a reasonable length of time so it is not just that you buy something and it falls apart and must be refunded or exchanged. Especially now when we want to promote a circular economy and ensure we are not just ditching products because they are faulty from the minute they are purchased, that right to repair is exceptionally important, as is an understanding of how long a product should last. I am not sure there is detail in the Bill as passed by the Dáil on that reasonable expectation about how long a product should last.

I would like to hear from the Minister of State on those issues. Other than that we welcome the Bill and look forward to its passage through this House.