Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 7 March 2013

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport and Communications

Social Media: Discussion (Resumed) with Twitter and Facebook

11:15 am

Ms Patricia Cartes:

On the dedicated hotline, we found that a number of organisations do this work much better than we could do it. One has to think of the scheme under which we operate. We have 1 billion users across many countries. In regard to safety, it is engaging for the whole of Europe.

It would be quite difficult for me to be engaging in schools. However, we have done a number of events in Ireland, for instance, tonight's event with the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Fitzgerald, in one of the schools in Clondalkin. We did one in Lucan too. We have been engaging with several groups in Ireland over the past few weeks because we understand that this is a very serious matter that has stricken Ireland quite heavily over the past few months. We are not opposed to working in this manner through organisations that can help us reach an audience that we normally would not, for reasons of scale.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, we have a number of local partnerships. Much has been said today about the hotline that is being run in Ireland by ISPAI, hotline.ie. We work a lot with them and also with Webwise, which is an awareness centre providing the education sector with resources. We will continue to support both Webwise and hotline.ie, and any other partner, in the ways in which we can through resources, sometimes through funding and through working together on the feedback with which they provide us when we launch new features, etc., but we must bear in mind the massive scale at which we operate. Engaging in schools directly is probably not a good use of our time or the time of the schools. However, reaching them through these partners that we have in place is a much more significant way of engaging.

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