Dr. T.J. McIntyre:

I am an associate professor in University College Dublin, UCD, and chair of Digital Rights Ireland. In our submissions, we focused on several points that have been mentioned by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. We described in some detail why we believe the provisions of the Bill on online safety, which are separate from the requirements of the audiovisual media services directive, are in breach of national and European standards of freedom of expression and privacy. I am happy to elaborate on this later if the committee wishes.

It might be helpful to outline the wider regulatory context. This Bill has two parts. Part of it is required under European law to transpose the audiovisual media services directive, AVMSD. Ireland is long overdue in doing so. It should have been done by September 2020. The part relating to online safety goes significantly beyond that. Much of Part 4 of the heads of the Bill would create a national regime for controlling content typed or spoken, not merely audiovisual content, by individuals on a wide range of platforms, conceivably including private platforms. It would do so in a way that is essentially unprecedented in Irish or European law.

I am concerned that this new scheme, by being hitched up to the audiovisual media services directive, might result in this legislation being passed in a way that would not give us time for proper scrutiny. The problem is that the heads of the Bill in Part 4 merge together the two areas in a way that makes it difficult to disentangle them. The concerns we and, I believe, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties have relate largely to these domestic provisions and innovations. It would be appropriate to pull out those provisions now, hold them back and consider how they can, as the human rights commission pointed out in the earlier session today, be better aligned with national law in areas such as hate speech and with the forthcoming Digital Services Act from the European Union. The Digital Services Act is likely to be adopted within the next 18 months to two years. It will have a significant impact on this area. It is not clear that the national scheme being proposed in this Bill would be compatible with the Digital Services Act. It is likely that if we rush to adopt a scheme like this, it will have to be substantially reconfigured at significant cost to the taxpayer and the businesses affected within a short period before Ireland is required to implement the Digital Services Act.

As a practical matter, I suggest the appropriate means of handling the concerns expressed by a number of bodies about these aspects of the Bill would be to hold over those aspects, go to further consultation with them and take into account the input of other Departments. To a large extent, some of these problems relate to the origin of the Bill in a Department which does not have any real experience in regulating the Internet. It overlooks several significant issues of fundamental rights and Internet law which would probably have been considered had it gone to a fuller consultation more generally.