Ms Noeline Blackwell:

I thank the Senator for raising that question. It is a loaded one, but it is important.

It goes back to something that is really not happening, which is that there is little or no obligation on big tech companies to produce safe products for children. One is not allowed to sell a car or baby formula in the European Union without a certificate saying that it is inherently safe. It is not that a car will not knock a child down but it must be inherently safe. That is only barely starting at European Union level but to the credit of the EU, it is going further than many other places. In the US, for example, they are saying that they will not regulate AI for ten years. In terms of an awful lot of what we are looking at in the Children's Rights Alliance, we are saying that there is a really big responsibility on the companies to produce safe products in the first place.

The critical learning is really important for the issue of child sexual abuse material. Those deepfakes not only harm the children who are abused in them or semi-created in them; they also harm children in general because we are seeing it as children producing these, thinking that it is just fun. We have no regulation at all at European level on child sexual abuse material. We have not managed to get anything through simply because of the American concept of privacy. This is a bit controversial, but I will say it anyway. The American concept of freedom of speech, which is not the European concept, and the American concept of privacy have overridden entirely the right to protect children in the digital environment. Ireland is committed, in this particular Oireachtas, to developing a directive that can be brought in gradually. In the meantime, we have huge issues around our Tusla guidelines and the Children First guidelines. We have some really good legislation that is better than in other countries but it is not good enough. We need to protect children such that they understand what they are doing if they are making deepfakes or engaging in cyberbullying that is AI generated. There is that need but where is it to be in the curriculum? There is a most beautiful OECD video that is about half an hour long. In it, a teacher has all of the time in the world, it seems to develop it with the children. It now has to be embedded in the curriculum and not just in one class. It is not just for a tech class but needs to be throughout the curriculum. It also needs to be throughout youth work, to pick up on the points made by the National Youth Council of Ireland. Other people need to be involved so that young people understand that it may not be right or what they are looking for may not be right and they understand the harmful and criminal nature of it. We also have to resource our gardaí and the Director of Public Prosecutions to be able to understand what they are seeing and to be able to stop this criminal activity.