Ms Julie Inman Grant:

We had the same fear-mongering and there were times when we were concerned as well. Because we were a new entity, particularly for youth-based cyberbullying, we had more of a trickling effect at the beginning than we were hoping for. As we raised awareness about our services, that started to gather pace. We have not had an advertising or marketing budget and we have had to use a lot of our own media to get word out that we are a new agency and that we are here to help people. We also find over time that we need to do more to encourage young people to engage in help-seeking. Only 50% of young people will speak to trusted adult, such as a teacher or a parent, when things go wrong online. Even fewer will report to a social media site, let alone a Government entity, because they do not think anything will happen. That will all take time to build.

As we went into the pandemic, as I mentioned, we saw a surge of reports. At one point, in April 2020, around the Easter long weekend, we had a 600% increase in image-based abuse reports. There are a couple of reasons for that. Of course, more people were turning to digital intimacy tools when they were separated from their loved ones and things went wrong, but there were also four different variants of sexual extortion scams that were going around. These scams involved people stating that they had hacked into a person's hard drive and they had seen his or her intimate images and that the person must send them money, or a range of imposter accounts seeking to meet people, asking for a sexy Skype and using that as a form of sexual extortion for either more explicit images and videos or for money.

We had some surge funding given to us by the Government over the pandemic period in 2020 to accommodate the increase in reports. The way that Mr. Dagg has set up investigations is that we have multiple teams that all work together. We are prepared for surge support. If there is a surge in youth-based cyberbullying reports, the image-based abuse team can step in and help. We have never been overwhelmed. We have 26 million people. Ireland, I believe, has 5 million. It would not be intractable.