Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Sinn Féin is in favour of any measures which will contribute to the safety and protection of children in online spaces. We worked hard on ensuring additional measures for online safety, particularly for children, in our work on the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act. For example, we worked with other Members of the Houses and a large number of children's charities and advocacy groups to ensure that an individual complaints mechanism is available to social media users in situations where people are being harassed or bullied online. Coimisiún na Meán has not implemented that Part of the Bill as yet. However, I welcome the Minister's comments in that regard and look forward to hearing further progress on in that area.

Children need to be afforded protections from harmful content online, including online pornography, the subject matter of this Bill. Leaving children and parents to their own devices in managing this matter is ridiculous. The State needs to step up and protect children online in the same way we protect children from unsafe situations in the real world. It needs to do this by ensuring that those hosting this content introduce effective measures around age restriction. CyberSafeKids reported this year that 93% of children aged between eight and 12 years own a personal smart device, including 47% who own a smartphone, and 31% of eight- to 12-year-olds have unrestricted access to the Internet.

The Children's Commissioner for England reported in May 2023 that children as young as eight years of age have been affected by viewing pornography and most children have seen pornography by the age of 13, with most of them seeing it for the first time on social media.

Much has happened in the past few years with regard to online media regulation. The Online Safety and Media Regulation Act, which was passed in December 2022, introduced the first Online Safety Commissioner. We have also had the passing of the EU Digital Services Act which includes measures to make very large online platforms more accountable. This includes a requirement to apply age verification to ensure children are better protected from age-inappropriate content. These new changes, in particular the establishment of Coimisiún na Meán, have introduced an entirely new mechanism for dealing with online safety and means this Bill is now out of date with regard to how to introduce these regulations. The Bill calls for ComReg to regulate but presumably the Online Safety Commissioner is now best placed to do that.

I am not sure if the legislation is now needed or can be amended on Committee Stage to the extent required. My understanding is that the 2022 Online Safety and Media Regulation Act includes a provision, section 139ZC, which provides for a scheme under which bodies are nominated. Those nominated bodies can then notify Coimisiún na Meán on certain matters, including concerns relating to the availability of age-appropriate online content on a designated service or relevant online service. Coimisiún na Meán can then take actions based on that notification. As the commission is in its infancy, it is not clear how exactly that would work but it may be sufficient to deal with matters such as the one named in this Bill.

It is also worth mentioning that this issue has proven to be problematic in other EU jurisdictions which have tried to legislate for it. There appears to be a clash of rights with regard to that protection. I understand a technological solution, which will hopefully work in tandem with existing European laws around data protection and privacy rights, is expected to be available soon. I hope this will ensure we can introduce age verification that will protect children from inappropriate and harmful content online. We will work towards that aim continuously with everybody who has an interest in the protection of children.

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