Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for the comments he has made on the progress we have initiated. We will not be able to evaluate the quality of the product until we see it in draft form at the end of this month and over Christmas when it will be published. Representatives from the Irish Secondary Schools Students Union were on the working group. We also had interdepartmental representation. The next stage will be to bring it to a wider forum and road test it to see whether it is robust enough. Perhaps on reflection, and I will return to the Deputy on this because I do not want to make a spontaneous commitment, we should review the situation in six months and see where we are and keep a monitor on it. The speed of technological change and the rapid evolution of social behaviour is such that we must think in very short bites of time compared to what would have been the case previously. Depending on the feedback, we might consider putting up a website of our own on which people could comment and interact because this is how people interact anyway. If this is the new medium, perhaps we should have a space in it to monitor what people say. I am open to comments and suggestions on this.

The big difficulty is ensuring parents know what their children are doing in this area. When the drug phenomenon broke first in this country, a generation of parents had never smoked or encountered the modern manifestations of drugs. I attended a parent teacher meeting at my son's school approximately five years ago where the local community Garda showed parents what drugs looked like and what pipes were. This is information parents would never know unless they had direct experience. Perhaps a pretty basic education for parents on what cyberbullying looks like is something we need to investigate and communicate also. Many parents simply are not aware of the way in which it occurs. They know about social media and how to use it themselves but they do not necessarily get into the spaces where bullying takes place and they have not seen it. Therefore, they do not know what to look for. We will have the report at the end of the year and we will disseminate it as widely as possible. We should also include a monitoring process to see how it will travel.

With regard to the schoolyard in its metaphysical and representational sense, in the old days bullying originated and happened in schools and it is still the place where the cause for bullying is initiated in the main, because it is where young people encounter each other. It spills out into the community and now it is 24-seven. Schools have a central role to play and they will remain central to the issue for a large number of people who have been cyberbullied. I thank Deputy for the points he has raised.

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