Green Party TD and Justice Spokesperson Patrick Costello reacted to this decision “To be clear, this ruling happened in spite of the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), not because of them.”

Today the European Data Protection Board’s (EDPB) fined META €1.2 billion. The Irish DPC’s peers across Europe voted that “the Irish supervisory authority” failed to comply with the GDPR by refusing to tell Meta to ban the unlawfully transferred data.

“This ruling is the result of a decade-long case on Meta’s involvement in US mass surveillance. It involved three judicial reviews against Irish DPC. The original DPC decision was overruled by EPDB who insisted on the record fine imposed here and that Meta must suspend the transfer of data from the EU to the US.”

“This is not the first time that the Irish DPC have failed to levy appropriate fines against tech multinationals. In the Irish Council of Civil Liberties report last week, which examined the enforcement of GDPR across Europe, it found that Irish decisions on GDPR were overruled 75% of the time by the EPDB. The next highest rate of overrule was France with 2%.”

“It’s clear that the Irish DPC is failing miserably in protecting not only Irish citizens, but EU citizens as a whole. The Oireachtas Justice Committee published a report on GDPR, and as part of this called for a review of the DPC. I am now calling for the Minister to ensure this review goes ahead as a matter of urgency. The Minister has also announced the appointment of two additional commissions, again this should be expedited as a matter of urgency.”

Concluding he remarked, “Ireland benefit’s massively from corporation tax receipts from tech giants, such as META. With this comes responsibilities to protect the privacy of these platform’s users. To date we have not lived up to that.”