Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)

I thank the Minister. I have concerns. For a start, the focus being entirely on children and vulnerable people risks leaving behind the rest of the population. I am hearing more and more about age verification being a silver bullet to resolve everything. I have huge concerns about age verification, even if it is robust. It raises major privacy issues in that it would hand over official documentation to providers that have already proven that they do not respect our privacy. It has a cut-off point, which means that those who are not using age verification remain on a much darker Internet without those protections. We need algorithms turned off by default.

The Minister referenced EU law and said that is the best place to deal with this, but even this week we have seen rollbacks on the GDPR and potential rollbacks on the AI Act. I am not comforted that the EU level of action around this is adequate. We have a specific role to play, given that so many tech companies are headquartered here.

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