Ms Grainia Long:

I will work my way through the questions and my colleagues will answer as well. There are three key parts to our view of what a strategy would look like, which will probably cover all of the questions.

I cannot stress enough the importance of formal and informal education in solving this problem. All of the members have mentioned in their comments that education is required for children, young people and parents. I will start with children and young people. To be blunt, our education curriculum does not prepare people for the outside world. We are frankly naive as a society if we think that what we teach children about sex and sexual behaviour is enough to equip them. The sooner we recognise that and it is reflected in our curriculum the better for children and child safety. The national strategy needs to be owned by Government and rolled out by four key Departments. The Department of Education and Skills would play a key role.

In terms of educating children, the curriculum needs to reflect reality. The technology aspect is best suited for a debate on a separate day. There are whole groups of people who will argue the case for more children and particularly girls to study technology. We also need, as part of our curriculum, to recognise the importance of educating young people about sex, sexual behaviour, and online behaviour. The curriculum needs to do this work formally. Other countries do this work as a matter of course. This aspect does not form a sufficient part of our curriculum and we need to fix the situation.

As Ms O'Sullivan has said, a lot more can be done to build resilience. There are national programmes available that will help to supplement and build resilience in children and young people. I do not have a strong view one way or the other whether it is formal education in schools or programmes like CyberSafeIreland are used. I would prefer the matter formalised within the education system. Every time we move it out to other organisations it becomes disparate, whether the schools can afford same and whether the school considers it to be a priority. It is left to either the principal or the board of governors to make it a priority. We need to make cybersafety a national priority and consistently available to children. My feeling is the more formal this is the better.

We have seen good examples of third level educators making training available on consent, for example, and notions of consent for third level students. It means first year girls and boys or young men and women attend consent classes, which is excellent, but it is 12 years too late. If we do not start talking to boys and girls about consent in an age appropriate way, one does not train and teach young people in the same way one does 18 or 19 year olds. We need to talk about these issues earlier in schools. We must help and enable parents to talk about these issues. We undertook a piece of internal research last year on the perceptions of Childline among children, young people and their parents. I was amazed to find that parents will say they are delighted when their children call Childline because sometimes they feel embarrassed to talk to their children about sex. If that view pervades culturally within Ireland then we have a long way to go. We need a formalised system of education that is not at the discretion of boards of governors, principals or patrons. We need a formal system of sex education and education on how to use technology safety. Only then can we say we have equipped our children and young children.

I accept that cybersafety is extremely difficult for parents. Parents have often said to us through our support line that they feel ill equipped because they do not feel they are tech savvy. Our experience is that cybersafety is down to parenting and the standard of communication one has with one's child. We see our children and young can fluently use tablets and technology. People confuse that ability to be tech savvy with the ability to make the right decision online. The decisions that young people make online have nothing to do with their technological ability or that of their parents. Let us take two 14-year olds who are online and they are faced with a decision about whether to send a photo of themselves to somebody who they think they know. More than likely one girl will say "Yes" while the other girl will say "No". The more we understand their environment, psychological make-up and how they have been parented the better.

It is down to issues like that and which nothing to do with technology that affects how the young person makes that decision.

Education for parents needs to start and end with the level of communication and resilience they have built in their children over time. We have ideas about how to do that, including support for teachers. I imagine that too often people come before the committee and say our teachers need to be trained to do that. We do not say that on top of everything else teachers have to be responsible for the safety of children and young people online but this needs to be formalised within the curriculum and resourced properly.

I was asked about the law and the office of the digital safety commissioner, ODSC. We spent a great deal of time examining the LRC report and I urge members to read it. It is an exceptional piece work, which gives a substantial overview of digital safety law, where the gaps are and how they can be filled. We strongly agree with the creation of new offences that reflect our online world. Harassment online is a different from offline harassment. It works differently and it is more pervasive. As Ms O'Sullivan said earlier, it is extremely difficult to get away from. In this job, I am rarely shocked but I have been shocked over the past year by the emergence of stalking by young people of other young people. We need to be grown up and recognise that and not assume that only adults stalk others. There are ways to recognise this behaviour and it should be made an offence.

However, the LRC has said that in creating new offences, children should not be criminalised in that way. The offences should be created to detect and prosecute adults but we should behave responsibly in taking prosecutions against a child. That would only be done in exceptional circumstances at the discretion of the DPP. As Ms O'Sullivan said, we are learning all the time that children and young people feel ill-equipped to make the right decisions online. They often do not understand the consequences of their decisions and it is worrying that we detect a sense of remoteness in children when they have been online for a long period as they lose a sense of empathy. Sometimes when we work with them, it is clear they do not understand the impact of their actions. It is very sad and worrying and Ms O'Sullivan will refer to this again.

The real change can happen is the ODSC. I am not necessarily a fan of the creation of new offices for the sake of it but this will be different because the office should have a co-ordination role. The LRC suggested the office should have three functions. First, it should co-ordinate all the education work that is in place. There has been a proliferation of organisations doing work in this area, including ours. That is great but a co-ordinating organisation is needed. We also need to make sure there are standards for educating parents and young people in this area. Many good organisations are doing this work but we are less convinced some of them should be going into classrooms educating young people. Second, the office should set standards for industry. We need to be clear that industry needs to play a role. Companies need to step up to the plate to make technology available to children and young people. The office should put a set of guiding principles in place that industry would have to follow. It could then take action. Individuals could contact the commissioner if they wanted information deleted online. The right to have information removed would be placed with the office. If the industry body, ISP, telecommunications provider and so on did not follow the request, action could be taken. It would be a useful office. Third, the office should have an important role in investigating individual cases, That would formalise much of the law in this area and regulate a regulatory policy.

I was asked whether Tusla is the right organisation for that. Several organisations need to be involved. Tusla has an important education function and, therefore, it needs to play a role in this regard but the right organisation needs to be the ODSC because technical experts are needed as well as people who understand the regulation of industries well and who can investigate online safety cases. My preference is that this office does this but we have always felt that Tusla also needs to have a role because it has an education function. That body needs to contribute. Many of the referrals we receive in these cases come to us through Tusla and, therefore, it must be part of the debate.

On the apps question, we spend a great deal of time looking at Facebook, Google and Twitter. Those companies get the scale of the risk to children and young children and they are putting serious resources into this area. Alongside them, there is a long trail of much smaller companies that set out to make money and commercially exploit children and young people. Not all apps do that but app providers and developers need to be regulated. We need to focus on that as much as we focus on the large companies. A great deal of emphasis is placed on these large companies. We were particularly worried by an app called Yellow late last year, which in our view was a dating app targeted at children and young people. It was difficult to find out how well regulated it was and what were the terms and conditions before it went live. Our understanding was it was focused on teenagers and even though the company may well have a different view, the look, feel and language used to market the app were aimed at children and young people. As a result, when we set up an account to examine this, it was obvious to us the terms and conditions were not available in an accessible way to children and young people. If they tried to join the app, it was easy to do so. It should not have been that readily available to children and young people.