Ms Niamh Hodnett:

We published a call for input last summer to ask people what harms we should address and what measures we should put in place. We got a lot of informative views from this, which raised many of the issues Senator Seery Kearney has set out. Our policy division has a focus on children and vulnerable adults. It also has a focus on democracy, elections and disinformation, a focus on codes and rules, and a focus on illegal content such as terrorism and child sex abuse material.

We also established a user engagement division. In this we have a colleague who is focused on education, user awareness and media literacy as well as a colleague who is over the contact centre and a colleague who is over handling complaints. We are a relatively new organisation. We are growing in size and capacity. As we build on this capacity and get the basic building blocks of regulation in place this year, which is what we are trying to do, we will be able to build up the educational role to be able to look at ways of doing it. We have engaged with the Minister, Deputy Foley, on looking at ways to empower schools and children with regard to online safety. We will also look at other avenues such as, perhaps, how to provide toolkits of assistance to people to guide them with complaint handling or how to raise a complaint. We are constantly looking at ways of how we can build the education role through our user engagement division.