Ms Fiona Jennings:

I saw the testimony of the young people from Tallaght and Kinsale. It is 2021 and they said things that we have been listening to for the past number of years. I totally agree with them that we should not regulate for everything. It is not necessary. However, we need to regulate for the right things. That is my first comment. In that respect, education has a massive role to play.

When we talk in the ISPCC about the different types of harm we find the four Cs very useful: content, where the child is a recipient; contact, where the child is a participant; conduct, where the child is an actor; and contract, a new one that has been updated. The special rapporteur touched on the latter yesterday in respect of online gambling. There is a plethora of online harms so the first question we must ask ourselves is what we want to regulate and what needs to be regulated versus where education plays a role in this as well. We all are online now, we are a lot more proficient online and our lives have moved online.

Adults as well as children and young people need to have a better understanding as to how content is served up, how we can manage that and how we can protect our privacy online. To summarise, we need to understand what we want to regulate, and why, and where education can be brought in.