Ms Patricia Cronin:

To bring the Deputy up to speed, the AVMS was finalised at a meeting this morning.

In terms of the scope of it, as the Deputy mentioned a regulatory body will have to be established. As he said it will either be a new one or an existing one. Clearly the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, BAI, is in the frame for that. Because this is such a new area, we in the Department are taking the opportunity to travel and meet with many other member states to get a sense of their approach. It is a big area. The audiovisual media services, AVMS, directive will clearly be of particular significance to Ireland because of the platforms we have here. We are therefore keen to learn from other member states about how they are managing. We met with representatives from the UK, which I know is about to depart. We will also be going to the Nordic countries. We really want to go very broadly on this to make sure that we get it right because how to regulate this space is a very significant decision.

On age verification, the directive itself refers to protecting minors and the general public from certain audiovisual content and about protecting the general public from content, including advertising, the dissemination of which is a criminal offence. These offences are terrorist-related offences, child sexual abuse material offences, and offences of racism and xenophobia. The model proposed in the directive is one of co-regulation between the platforms and a regulatory body. Part of that means that we will have to look at age verification and parental controls, because the Deputy is right, the directive does refer to minors. We have 21 months to transpose the directive so we really are going to be very thorough in how we do this and we will try and get it-----