Mr. Mark Malone:

We are not policing experts, but it is quite clear that the operational decision made there was not child centred. Where there is a known situation, for example, where children are going to be brought in to an emergency accommodation centre, there is an onus to have a multiagency approach to policing. Ms McDonald would probably speak to that a bit better. In circumstances where you know you are going to be bringing children into a location, you should not reach the stage where there is public order policing because that is clearly traumatic for children. There is a bit of thinking through needed here, and maybe questions could be asked about policing approaches to static protests or mobilisations that set themselves up as deliberately seeking to create spaces of conflict and how these can be engaged with directly.

The problem we have in the context of social media is that there does not seem to be an understanding on the part of the Government and political parties in general of the extent, scale, prevalence and dynamics involved in what has played out over the past four or five years. We have written a bit about the great replacement conspiracy theory. I will quote a portion of the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attack on Christchurch masjidain on 15 March 2019, which was published in December 2020. The report relates to a shooting incident where someone walked into two separate mosques. As a result of that person's actions, there were 51 deaths and 40 injuries. I recommend that every member of the committee reads the report. I will read from the report, because of an important context to this later on. It states:

We are satisfied that by January 2017 the individual had a terrorist attack in mind. We are also satisfied that when the individual came to live in New Zealand on 17 August 2017, it was with a fully-developed terrorist ideology based on his adoption of the Great Replacement theory and his associated beliefs that immigration, particularly by Muslim migrants ...

It also states:

We see the terrorist attack as resulting very much from an unhappy conjunction of his personality ... his financial circumstances ... his underlying political views (particularly his ethno-nationalist views and his belief in the Great Replacement theory) ...

Towards a conclusion, in terms of the broader context, the report states:

Before 15 March 2019, there had been many extreme right-wing terrorist attacks in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, which showed that ideological thinking along the lines of the Great Replacement had the capacity to motivate some people to extreme violence.

In 2019, the Irish Freedom Party was launched in the RDS. I will not name individuals involved, but the leader of that organisation introduced a person who was involved with the UK Independence Party, UKIP, and who started his speech by asking if those present had heard about the great replacement theory. This is an organisation that is hosted by YouTube. That video is labelled by YouTube as being related to the great replacement theory and far-right content. The video has been viewed 15,000 times, and the YouTube channel has over 2,000 views. That is organisation, one or two others and a network have, over the past four or five years, been pushing the great replacement theory very specifically or recontextualising of the plantation in Ireland. That terrorist ideology is deeply imbedded in the movements we look at. So we have seen and speak about, and as we have all witnessed, there has been a rise in frequency and intensity of anti-migrant mobilisations. There has also been a growth in the number of arson attacks. There have been 23 arson attacks since 2017, the vast majority of which happened in the past 18 months. We have also seen a riot where a distributed network of folks were able to marshal and put many people on to the streets really quickly in anger and disgust. So the direction of travel is fairly obvious to us.