Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

Those rooms are rare. One is traceable if one participates in a chat room. Parents who are afraid for their children can control a great deal, but unless they sit behind the children while on-line, they cannot determine what sites are being visited and what is being said. There is a heightened risk.

I take Deputy Lynch's point that irrespective of the Internet, a determined paedophile can go to extraordinary lengths to insinuate himself or herself into the company of parents and children. We should not be blind to that fact, but we should acknowledge that what Deputy Peter Power stated is true, namely, children are being bombarded on all sides by ideas, images, a lack of values and sexualising material as part of the new information age to which Deputy Cuffe referred. No matter how vivid our imaginations were 30 to 40 years ago, we were not in the same place. Human nature changes to some extent, but it does not in other senses. Whereas Ireland in the 1950s had its fair share of dirty thoughts, occasions of sin and so on, we are in a different world.

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