Dr. T.J. McIntyre:

The Senator asked what we can do immediately. I looked back through my notes to prepare for today's hearing and I saw that the first time I spoke to an Oireachtas committee on this matter was March 2013. At that stage I said we urgently needed greater funding and training for police in the area of responding to social media abuse and greater funding for the Data Protection Commission for supporting individuals with regard to so-called revenge porn intimate image offences.

Nearly a decade on, that is still largely true. We can do this immediately in cases of serious abuse. Unfortunately, we still find the prosecution of somebody for these kinds of abuse a rarity worthy of comment. Unfortunately, we still find many individuals let down by the justice system. I am a practising solicitor and I have encountered in my professional capacity a number of individuals who have been the victims of online abuse. Very often their message is that they took their complaints to the Garda and were told the complaints could not be dealt with, that they were civil matters because the abusive material was hosted on a service in another jurisdiction, and there was nothing the Garda could do about the complaints. We can handle that side of things - immediate, severe harms - already if we have the funding to do so. We had functioning legislation under the old Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act. We now have stronger legislation in Coco's Law. On that side of things, the challenge is enforcement, not new legislation.

To respond to Senator Byrne's broader question, which was what Ireland should do in the meantime, we can certainly progress with online harm legislation, but trying to shove it into the model of the audiovisual media services directive will be unproductive, particularly given that we see a different model coming down the road in the form of the Digital Services Act. At this stage, to the extent we want to focus on particular categories of harm, bullying in particular, the committee could consider whether that is adequately dealt with in Coco's Law; if not, why not; and whether we should look at an expansion of that. However, the aim here, to have a very ambitious package dealing with all online harms, is doomed to failure in its current form, partly because of the constitutional difficulties we, the ICCL, and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission have identified but also because it tries to shove a square peg into a round hole.