Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

During the initial set-up of the hotline, the ISPCC focused on community-based promotion of the service, holding many presentations for local community groups and producing posters, flyers and business cards for distribution to all Garda stations from headquarters. The Garda has been very co-operative in the development of this hotline and many businesses have also been informed. The ISPCC has used social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to advertise the service on an ongoing basis. When the service was launched there was much promotion, but if any businesses or media outlets want to offer support to the promotion of this hotline, I invite them to do so. It is a very important service. The Deputy mentioned airports and perhaps we could get some support from the airport authorities, so I will raise it with the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Varadkar, and see if we can take the initiative in that regard. We must ensure people are alert to the fact that the missing children hotline number is available and should be used by people if they have information or need support.

I attended the launch of the child helpline in Brussels two weeks ago which brought together data from European countries. It is extraordinary that there have been 58 million calls to European child helplines over ten years from children, with 3 million calls from children regarding violence and abuse, primarily at the hands of family members. These are really disturbing statistics. The top concern in calls made by children was mental health, at 18% of calls, with abuse and violence also at 18%. Peer relationships were the subject of 15% of calls and bullying featured quite strongly also. There is a real need to gather the data from these helplines, although they are not all concerned with missing children; they are the general helplines that children can use in all member states. Children are using them and we must ensure we build bridges between those helplines and national services so we can respond to the concerns that children have. There are new and emerging issues, such as cyber-bullying, which also featured quite strongly in the calls to hotlines. There is much information about concerns of children and we must act on that.

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