Professor Conor O'Mahony:

To my mind, the absence of an individual complaints mechanism is the single biggest weakness in the Bill as it stands. If we persist with an approach that does not include provision for individual complaints, it is probable that we will be heavily criticised in the near future by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child for that failure. The thing about the risk of it being overwhelmed is that we do not need to think of an individual complaints mechanism in a State agency as the first port of call. Ideally, the law should be structured in such a way that one imposes strong obligations on the service providers themselves to have local-level complaints mechanisms such that the complaint would in the first instance go to the service provider, which would have a legal obligation to have a mechanism for dealing with that complaint, responding to it and removing content. It would only be in cases where that fails at local level with the service provider that the complaint would then be escalated to whichever State agency is regulating this area of activity. In that way, one tries to filter out the majority of the complaints before they reach the relevant State agency and that avoids the risk of it being overwhelmed in the way that has been identified.

As I have said, it is not sustainable to leave this out of the Bill.