Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The amendment has two purposes. First, it seeks to ensure the measures taken under online safety codes create equal level protections for users of Irish and English language user-generated content available on designated online subject to online safety codes. Second, it seeks to ensure that Irish language content cannot be removed or prevented from appearing on a designated online service if similar English language content was not removed or prevented from appearing from the service.

I cannot accept these amendments for a number of reasons. The first of these is that the online safety codes will give effect to provisions of EU law in many case, particularly in the implementation of the EU's audiovisual media services directive. In that regard, it would be inappropriate to single out only two of the official languages of the EU.

The second reason is that the proposed requirement for designated online services to not remove Irish language content would not reflect the fact that Irish and English are separate languages and a word or phrase that may be functionally equivalent in each may carry entirely different implicit meanings or connotations that may cause either or both to fall within a particular category of harmful online content. This is the case not only with English and Irish, but with all languages. In fact, it is a particular problem space in online safety and something that coimisiún na meán will need to be alive to in operating the regulatory framework for online safety.