Mr. Declan Daly:

Our legislation is internationally recognised as strong. For example, our definition of child pornography covers texts and cartoon images depicting children. In other countries, the legislation only includes images. Our legislation, in terms of definitions, is strong. Clearly we in An Garda Síochána would always look - I suppose we would be greedy - for additional tools.

The following are some of the areas where we have been engaging with the Department of Justice and Equality in terms of new legislation on issues that we see may assist us in combatting online child abuse. With regard to search warrants, we would look for an amendment to the legislation that would allow for us to obtain passwords of persons when we are conducting searches. Another would be the development of a production order that we could serve on a service provider and thereby recover information rather than going through a warrant. These are additional tools that would assist us. As the assistant commissioner states, a phone is no longer just a phone, it is a computer-enabled device. For those who have such a phone in public areas, our legislation is weak in terms of search. We would look for additional powers to maybe search without warrant so that we can cover that. Much of the material we are finding is not on a home computer, it is on a phone. We must seek to change the legislation and view a phone in terms of it also being a computer.