Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It has been a very interesting session and a great many of the questions and observations have been responded to very well. This is an area which has been of huge interest to Deputies, Senators and society as a whole. I will be brief, as I do not want to labour any point. We are here because of what was done to Dara Quigley. I did not know her but a terrible wrong was done to that young woman. We look at social media as a wondrous thing but it has an underbelly of depravity, which sometimes brings out the worst in people.

Justice has not been served with regard to those involved in Dara Quigley's untimely death, but I hope it will be.

These platforms make a great deal of money from young people and there is a form of social baiting that takes place on them. They give a platform to people who would not normally act out in some ways. They are given ways to act out online. There is a great responsibility on technology companies to act responsibly not only in respect of themselves but in relation to the people who use their platforms. Everybody has a smartphone. In some ways, we love them because they are so useful and permit human beings across the world to communicate. However, they have also become dangerous weapons that can destroy someone in the blink of an eye. There have been other incidents in which people have shared images, videos and all sorts of material which were deeply personal and have wronged not only the victim but the victim's family also. It is extremely difficult to police it. The genie is out of the bottle. How do we monitor the wild web? It comes down sometimes to our own behaviour but largely to the companies that provide this technology. They say it is freedom of expression and freedom of speech but one does not provide freedom of hate and freedom of depravity which hurts other people.

The question is how to police these platforms. The law needs to change. It must be updated from where it was in the mid-1990s. The Internet did not exist as it does now 20 to 25 years ago. If individuals did elsewhere what they sometimes do online, they would generally end up in court. In Dara Quigley's case, for example, if someone put such images up in the form of posters all over the city centre and was identified, he or she would end up in a court of law. There is no doubt about that. However, the fig leaf provided by online platforms has given some people the green light to do things they should not. It is just an observation. The law must be updated. The Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act dates from the 1990s and contains no reference to cyberbullying or digital or online harassment. I understand the law will be updated by the end of the current parliamentary term. I hope that happens to protect everyone who uses the Internet. The Internet is here to stay but while there are positives to it, there is also an underbelly that has extremely detrimental effects on our physical and mental health.