Mr. Tiernan Kenny:

What I would say regarding teams and social media, we think children should be able to have safe and age-appropriate experiences online. As a reflection of how we live in the offline world, there are some things we do not permit children to do until they reach a certain age.

As Dr. Evans said, we have put in place a host of regulations over the past year or two. A lot of that is aimed at keeping children safe online. We are starting to see some of the platforms make changes in response to that. It is very important to hear the voices of young people in this debate because they will be directly affected. At Coimisiún na Meán, we have established our youth advisory committee and we regularly engage with it. We consulted with the committee on the development of the online safety code and discussed the European Commission's Article 28 guidelines with it. The Deputy might have seen that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced last week, as part of her state of the Union address, the establishment of a European task force to look at the possibility of a social media ban. So that certainly is an area of active debate.

When you speak to young people, you find that they can have challenging, difficult or dangerous experiences online. They recognise that there are benefits to being online. People who are growing up discover their identity there and find like-minded tribes. They get exposed to different forms of creativity and there are educational advantages as well. Obviously, the risk with a ban is that all of this goes away.

As Dr. Evans mentioned, we very closely co-operate with Australia's eSafety Commissioner. We are both members of the Global Online Safety Regulators Network. We will stay in close contact with our Australian counterparts and will learn from their experience as the ban is implemented.