Professor James O'Higgins Norman:

Social media refers to many organisations and companies. Some of them are extremely small and are providing apps that kids can download very quickly to their phones without their parents realising the full implications of them. It also refers to enormous corporations, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and so on. In recent years I have seen greater engagement by some of those and not so much by others in trying to deal with online safety. Any of the companies we have worked with are very anxious to try to address these problems. They often look to us for solutions, help and advice.

I think things are getting better. Everyone agrees that more needs to be done. We also need to recognise that the behaviour that makes its way onto these platforms is human behaviour that exists without the platforms. I am not so sure we can say the platforms cause it. For example, some of the research that looks at gaming shows that there is very little in online games that causes or produces negative behaviour, but the way people behave in those games, the way they speak to one another and the way they relate to one another can be really horrible at times. This comes back to being a human behaviour that needs to be addressed. Whether it is expressed on social media or elsewhere, it is a problem.

The online safety commissioner's role must be to make it as easy as possible for people to have some place to go if they have a problem. As I said earlier, at the moment there is considerable development in artificial intelligence, AI, to address some of these issues. However, AI can only do so much. Education and regulation are the way forward. People need to feel they have some kind of recourse to the online safety commissioner when everything else fails. Before that, we need to have education and have people using these facilities in a different way from how they have been using them.

The Chairman also asked what we would do if we had a magic wand. Regarding resources for schools, as someone said earlier, time is getting squeezed out of our schools. Every day there is increasingly less time to think and to do things that are really meaningful because teachers, parents and everyone in the school are under so much pressure. If we had a way to give schools a bit of time, maybe cover for substitutes to allow teachers to take up continuing professional development and making time available in that way, it would be really important. There is also a role for the school inspectorate in the whole-school evaluation and looking at how schools are handling bullying and cyberbullying issues within schools, particularly educating teachers about the fullness of their role.