Ms Annmarie O'Connor:

Deputy Ellis mentioned online abuse. As public services and essential services such as banking and financial services become increasingly digitalised, people are required to live their lives online. Without a doubt, adults who may be at risk of harm are being targeted by people who are seeking to profit from their situation. With regard to financial abuse, as Ms Rickard-Clarke said we do not provide a service directly to the public but we get a lot of queries from the public and we interact with a wide range of organisations. A risk of financial abuse is most definitely created where people find it difficult to engage with services, financial services in particular, and do not have the assistance of a third party. Safeguarding Ireland had a high degree of involvement over the past year around the issue of the banks exiting the market and people having to transfer their accounts and open new bank accounts. A lot of people experienced difficulty in setting up new accounts, etc. While the banks were conscious of the risks for certain people and provided a lot of support, it exposed the issue of people struggling to use online services autonomously. This undoubtedly creates a risk of financial abuse and of other types of online abuse.

It relates not just to the risk of their money being taken from them but also their personal data and of all kinds of other abuses. We are increasingly aware of the risk of online harms but I am not sure we are aware of how those harms occur, who is targeted and what the preventive measures required are. We would certainly say that services need to be designed in order that people can use them safely. There is a lot of emphasis, as members are probably aware, on financial and digital literacy and so on. While they serve a purpose, we need to have services that people can access safely. My colleague Patricia Rickard-Clarke and I sometimes meet adults who may have intellectual disabilities or other disabilities and they are very conscious of the risk of abuse. In some cases, they are quite fearful of the harms of engaging with digital services. If we are to digitalise - and we are digitalising - we need to place a greater focus on the harms that can people can be exposed to. It is not all about teaching people about the risks as it also is about taking the risk out of the services.