Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 7, between lines 7 and 8, to insert the following:“ “Audiovisual Media Services Directive” means Directive 2010/13/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 10 March 2010 on the coordination of certain provisions laid down by law, regulation or administrative action in Member States concerning the provision of audiovisual media services; “audiovisual media service” has the same meaning as it has in Article 1 of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive;”.

Subsection (1) is a prohibition on the advertising of alcohol online unless all reasonable steps are taken to ensure that children cannot view the advertising. All reasonable steps is a formula widely found in the Statute Book. It is the same test used by the Department of Health on the offence of selling tobacco products to children under 16. The reference to information society services reflects the EU terminology used to define services such as websites, email, search engines, Twitter and YouTube, etc., and it is the terminology used by the Department of Health in its ban on e-cigarettes.

Section 6, subsection (2), then sets out factors to be taken into account in determining whether reasonable steps have been taken to ensure that advertising cannot be viewed by children. The reference to the court or jury reflects the fact that the offence could be tried on indictment before a jury. The subsection is not proscriptive as to what constitutes "all reasonable steps" but I expect that it would effectively require the following: age gates which would at least consist of a user-entered date of birth or similar; the use of any demographic targeting tools provided by advertising networks to limit viewing to users over 18; and registration of websites with internet filtering software providers and a restriction on retweets, send by email and similar tools where these would have the effect of exposing an advertisement to a new audience which could potentially include children.

The reference to "state of technological development" is borrowed from the Data Protection Acts 1998 and 2003 and it is intended to have the effect that the duty to prevent viewing by children will become more stringent as time progresses and access controls become more effective.

Subsection (3) provides that the offence only apply to audiovisual media services originating in Ireland. This is done to reflect the country of origin principle in the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, AVMSD, which prevents Ireland from imposing these rules on services originating in other European Economic Area, EEA, jurisdictions. I had expected that the Department of Health would table its own amendment in similar terms but alas this did not happen.

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