Professor Joe Carthy:

It is fairly straightforward. In Ireland, a person cannot apply for a driver's licence without proving that he or she is of the appropriate age. If Ireland does something, other countries will follow. We are waiting for countries to take sensible steps in this. Jurisdictions around the world are at a primitive stage, but if Ireland adopted sensible legislation, other jurisdictions would see that it makes sense and would follow in our footsteps. It is not a technological difficulty. The companies that appear next week will make all sorts of protests about it, but this could be a very straightforward mechanism. It can be solved by the technology in a very straightforward way and it would make a huge difference. We cannot overstate the difference verification would make. We should also remember that most of the people on the Internet are sensible people who do sensible and good things. Not everybody has a fake account. A small subset of the population is misusing the Internet. I would not want to give the impression that everyone in the population is using the Internet in an inappropriate manner, but unfortunately a significant number of people do and inevitably anonymity exacerbates the problem.