Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the guests. I am happy for any of them to take the questions. My first point concerns the general issue of bullying in society, which children are aware of. I suspect that bullying is very different now from how it was 20 or 30 years ago because, from my observations, it has become mainstream and features in media, game shows, reality TV shows and politics as well. I sometimes think we have to bully-proof our political campaigning because children see what is happening in wider society and impersonate what they see on screen and what is deemed to be acceptable.

Furthermore, bullying nowadays does not just happen in school. It can follow people home because as long as they have a smartphone and other people have access to the phone number, they can be bullied at all hours of the day and night. There was a time when people could escape from it, at least until Monday, when they went home to the bosom of their family. Now it can happen all weekend long, through the night and the early hours of the morning. Schools will say they have an anti-bullying policy, but at what point does the school's responsibility finish? Obviously, bullying occurs not just within the student body; it can happen within the staff body as well, and children see this and are aware of it. Perhaps Dr. Muldoon or another of our guests will comment on that dynamic of not being able to escape bullying and of the wider societal responsibilities that politics or the media has.

My third question relates to the understanding of bullying. In my experience, parents will sometimes suggest that their child is being bullied because of a once-off incident. Much time can then be spent on trying to explain to the parent the nature of bullying, which is not a once-off incident. Bullying is the persistent intimidation or reduction of one person by another over a prolonged period. The very definition of bullying can sometimes be misunderstood, and it is difficult to tackle something such as bullying if there is such a misunderstanding of its nature.