Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for her response. I do not need to diminish the importance placed on online safety for children in primary and secondary school. In the context of the horrific events we have seen in the past week, I wish to reference the area of priorities. As we concern ourselves with what children are viewing online nationally, I cannot step away from what primary school children often witness when they walk outside of the school gates in the inner city and other parts of Dublin and around the country.

In my constituency, too often children walk outside of their school gates and are met by antisocial behaviour, open drug dealing and people in various states of intoxication. Those people have problems and are not to be used as a prop in the Dáil. However, there are issues of safety in general around those schools. I hope the Minister will now take the issue of safety around schools more seriously, engage across Cabinet and come up with a concerted plan to ensure we do not enable a scenario whereby children walk outside of their school gates and see open drug dealing and all sorts of antisocial behaviour. We need to start taking this a lot more seriously.

See this speech in context