Mr. Ronan Lupton:

I thank the Senator for his question. He gave me the elephant trap question how to define harm, and I appreciate that greatly. The situation is extraordinarily complex and if we borrow from the UK jurisdiction in terms of the efforts to define precisely what harm is, we will end up spending a serious degree of time, work and effort to try to find that definition.

From my point of view, there are two fundamental aspects we as a society and as legislators need to think about. The first is harm that is purely of a criminal nature, and we must ensure the Statute Book is tooled up and equipped to deal with criminally harmful content. Online-offline dynamics, which under the heads of Bill comprise the dissemination of information, intimidation, threatening, humiliating, persecuting and those types of behaviour, have been called out in various witness evidence as being somewhat vague.

The difficulty is that those definitions can be brought to the nth degree and it will take years trying to codify them and to set down what they are and need to be. It is a very difficult question to answer with any surety, but on one side - the important side - it is only when the code of conduct on criminal behaviour is dealt with properly on the Statute Book that it will become slightly easier to legislate for the civil harms and to give the job of regulation to a regulator, whether that is a digital safety commissioner under the new commission or otherwise, and we are not there yet.

As I mentioned earlier, while we are lucky to have Coco's Law passed and on the Statute Book, we are deficient in Garda training, for example, and in having the powers on the Statute Book necessarily to prosecute the egregious criminal harm that is going on. We have then to look at what the civil side is and how to get there. The efforts in the Bill are a starting point but the committee's deliberations will have to come to a certain point and members will have to try to draw a line under where the Bill can go. The issue of the offline versus online world and the experience on the civil side-----