Mr. Ronan Lupton:

As for the rights of the child, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNCRC, is quite clear. We are obliged to take consideration of the youngest and most infirm in society and ensure their rights are heard and vindicated. A good example of consultation taking place was that with the Data Protection Commissioner on the digital age of consent aspect of that legislation. I agree with Professor O'Mahony in terms of his submission on that.

I have a couple of issues with the idea of an individual complaints mechanism, the first of which relates to the experience in the data protection space, whereby people send individual complaints to the regulator when some of them should be sent to the person who is perpetrating the breach rather than being sent straight to a regulator. We could end up having a regulator or commission that is under-resourced and if that is so, that will not do the job we want it to do. In examining how something arises online, the first step that should be taken is to report the deleterious or negative content to the service provider, which should assess that content and take steps, although it usually will not or will have reasons it might not, for example.

The second step is to report the content to a regulator, which is what the Bill aims to achieve, but the question is what the regulator will do. I believe the regulator should be an advocate for the individual or child whose complaint has fallen on deaf ears, whether it is a criminal or civil complaint. We should build in the necessary mechanisms to allow it to go directly to the social media company, telephone company or whatever it is, and to make the case that this has not been dealt with, without recourse to the courts. That is fundamentally what the correct approach should be.

The Australian approach is a little more detailed and possibly would not suit the Irish environment. That said, while there is room for that model, opening an individual complaints mechanism to the football pitch, if one likes, and allowing everybody run to the new digital safety tsar, who will be either a member of the media commission or somebody separately appointed, will mean that within six to eight months, he or she will not be able to deal with the complaints as lodged and there will be a difficulty in that regard. It might suit from a constituent point of view to say we now have a Bill for this and here are the legislation and the regulation but if it is not functional, we will have a major problem with it. It will not do what it says on the tin.

The question is how to set the rules of engagement. Should we bring about codes of conduct and put them on a statutory footing in respect of how the behaviour should be engaged with between the content providers and the regulator, with a mechanism for the regulator acting as an advocate for the complainant to go the Garda and do the necessary when it comes to that? It is a vexed question - there are no two ways about it - but both as a citizen and as somebody giving evidence to the committee, I want to avoid ending up with a regulator who, first, may be under budget and under-resourced and, second, may be unable do the job he or she was put in place to do and as reflected in the legislation.

The question is how to build the rules of engagement and whether we can make those rules of engagement work. It might be that we should take up Dr. Docquir's suggestion for some form of social media council, or a rebranded NACOS, whereby we bring the necessary management from the operators to that council and have a discussion on what should and should not happen and how they are performing, and bring that into law or regulation of some manner. The question of the best route is one the committee may struggle with, but certainly on its face, having some form of individual complaints mechanism, with the correct parameters, is something we need to examine seriously.