Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Commissioner for joining us and appreciate her giving us her time today. We are, I hope, working our way slowly but surely out of a viral pandemic that has crippled Europe and the wider world. Throughout, we have become overwhelmed with misinformation. One might call it a misinformation pandemic. The after-effects of that may linger for significantly longer than will the effects of the pandemic itself. I recall Neelie Kroes in 2014 taking a significant step forward in empowering our young children to become more adept at manipulating technology and beginning that wonderful initiative that was EU Code Week.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, in the knowledge that our young people in particular need quickly to develop the skills necessary to become exceptionally digitally literate to be able to parse, analyse and critique all the information they encounter on the Internet using social media and other platforms, is it now time - perhaps this is something the Commission is already contemplating doing - to have a European-wide programme of digital literacy education for our young people, at both primary and post-primary level, that gives them those kinds of critiquing, parsing and analytical skills that are so crucial at a time they will most definitely be subjected to misinformation on a scale that is simply incomparable with what we encountered as young people growing up in the EU? Is that being contemplated? Does Ms Vestager have any comments to make about it?