Jim O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for attending. Just so that they are aware of what we are doing, we will ultimately produce a report on the issue of online harassment and harmful communications. Obviously, we will make recommendations on legislative changes, but we are not limited to that, since it is not as though we are a legislative group.

I agree with virtually everything Deputy Brophy stated. A part of the problem in a discussion about the Internet is that it can be broad, given the panorama of the Internet. As such, I would like to examine one or two specific issues and probe how to deal with them. Ms Counihan and Mr. Church raised an example - a woman under 18 years of age who is in a relationship consents in that relationship to intimate photographs being taken, but the relationship breaks down and her ex-partner subsequently posts the photographs online. Could we probe this example for a while? I would like to see how we might deal with it. That would give us a good roadmap for how to deal in general with these issues.

It appears to me that her right to privacy has been breached. Had those photographs been published in a newspaper, the courts would hold under the European convention and Irish constitutional law that the consent to the photograph being taken was a consent that was given in the context of a private relationship between her and her partner at the time. If her privacy has been broken - I believe it has - the difficulty that she faces at the outset is that, in order to give effect to that breach of privacy, she probably has to go to court. Do the witnesses believe it is necessary for us to put on a statutory basis the right to privacy that this woman has, which is a constitutional and convention right but is not given expression in Irish statute? I will turn to the criminal aspects subsequently but in terms of the civil aspects, does Ms Counihan believe that there should be a law of privacy that sets out the woman's right?