Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin North Central, Labour)
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I thank the Ceann Comhairle's office for affording me the opportunity to speak on this matter and I thank the Minster for coming into the House to address this issue. I am sure all Members would agree that cyberbullying is a major and increasing problem. We are mindful of the families of Ciara Pugsley and Erin Gallagher who reportedly died by suicide as a result of cyberbullying in the recent past.

I received responses to two parliamentary questions recently, one from the Minister's Department and one from the Department of Justice and Equality. The Minister's Department indicated that a working group is due to report by the end of November and, in fairness, it has been quite proactive in addressing bullying and is taking the issues in regard to cyberbullying quite seriously. Any fair-minded person would say that schools are not the only answer to tackling bullying. Children do not live in school, they live in communities. Parents and other members of the family have a huge role to play. If a parent is told their child may be involved in any sort of bullying it is very difficult for them to take that on board and they often assume their parenting skills are being brought into question but that is not the case. Bullying can happen to anybody and it can be carried out by anybody.

The response I received from Department of Justice and Equality seems to indicate there is a grey area relating to cyberbullying because we are not sure if cyberbullying can come under section 10 of the 1997 Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act and it has been referred to the Law Reform Commission. I suggest a cross-departmental group needs to be set up to discuss this issue in order to tackle it properly. It does not only come under the remit of the Department of Education and Skills or the remit of the Department of Justice and Equality.

The organisation SpunOut.ie believes such a cross-departmental group could potentially investigate a number of matters. It could investigate how schools could intervene in cases of cyberbullying, even if the bullying happens off-site. It could clarify if current legislation offers any remedy to victims such as barring or restraining orders as well as providing guidance to the Garda and schools on how to deal with cases of cyberbullying. Schools and members of An Garda Síochána need clarifications from the authorities that set out these guidelines. We need to examine establishing a team within the Garda who can track IP addresses through Internet service providers. The Department of Justice and Equality indicates that the Internet providers are quite proactive on this and work not only within the law but within the spirit of the law, but we need to nail that down. We need to examine how we can encourage schools to work with parents to remind them to monitor their child's Internet use and help their children if they are victims of cyberbullying and also to help their children if they believe they are engaging in bullying behaviour. Often a victim of bullying is the person who becomes a bully after that experience.

While the Minister's Department is doing great work and while the Department of Justice and Equality is mindful of the serious issue of cyberbullying, I request the Minister to consider the establishment of a cross-departmental group to properly tackle this issue. I would appreciate if he would respond to that request.

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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I thank the Deputy for raising this important issue. As he will know, I take the issue of bullying and cyberbullying in particular very seriously. Tackling the issue of bullying and bullying in schools is a key commitment in the programme for Government. That is one of the reasons the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Fitzgerald and I convened an Anti-Bullying Forum recently - on 17 May - to explore ways to tackle the serious problem of bullying in schools. The forum, which was very well attended and thought-provoking, considered issues around all forms of bullying, including homophobic bullying, cyberbullying and racist bullying. Remarkably, this was the first time the Department of Education and Skills, together with the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, had hosted a dedicated forum on this issue.

Alongside the forum, I established a working group to consider what further actions are required to tackle bullying in schools. I also called for submissions from stakeholders and interested parties. It is a measure of the interest and concern in this area that more than 65 submissions were received. The working group has since met with service providers, State agencies, representative groups and individuals and with colleagues from Scotland and the United Kingdom. I have asked the working group to submit its action plan to me by the end of this year. It will come in a draft form and it will then be circulated to the various participants for signing off. Realistically we will have it as an operational document by the commencement of January but the definitive work will be done by the end of this year. That group is examining measures to tackle all forms of bullying, including the specific issue of cyberbullying.

Recent tragic events have highlighted that advances in technology enable bullying to take place 24-7 on and off the school premises and that is the point to which the Deputy referred, which I accept. Malicious messages can now be sent via mobile telephone or posted on social media sites where they can be viewed by hundreds and sometimes thousands of other people.

Technology has opened up a new world of possibilities and the opportunity to communicate more widely and more quickly than ever before but, as we all know, this brings benefits but also, sadly, risks. While traditionally children and young people could identify who was bullying them, the use of technology means that sometimes they cannot. Some young people may not see the Internet as the real world, and therefore do not see that what they text or post as having the same impact as something they might say or do. Research shows that disconnecting the Internet or taking away a young person's telephone is not the answer.

While schools can block access to inappropriate sites through the school's broadband network, this does not stop children accessing websites and sending messages through their own devices. Therefore, adults, and in particular parents, as the Deputy said, need to be as engaged with children and young people about their behaviour when using their mobile telephone or going online as they are when children are out playing, socialising or at school.

In terms of the responsible use of technology, Internet service providers, mobile telephone operators and those running social networking websites also need to be part of the solution. However, cyberbullying should not be seen as just a problem of technology. Underlying all forms and types of bullying is a bullying behaviour or attitude that must in itself also be addressed.

A number of effective educational approaches are already in place which integrate parents as active facilitators of their children's digital media literacy and foster an ability in their children to self-manage potential risks in online environments. The Department has funded the Webwise integrated education initiative since 2006. This initiative focuses on raising the knowledge, skills and understanding around Internet safety of children, parents and other responsible adults, at school and in the home. Resources have also been developed for use as part of CSPE, SPHE and Stay Safe programmes. For instance, Be Safe Be Webwise, the first educational programme of its kind in Europe, was designed to address the personal safety needs of our young people online and to help them become safe and responsible Internet users for life. For 2012, the Garda primary schools programme has introduced a new initiative called Respectful Online Communication. This initiative addresses the personal safety that arises through communicating using new media.

These are just a few examples of the school-based work that is going on around cyberbullying and how these issues can be addressed through the school curriculum. It is clear the curriculum is an important tool in helping children and young people to develop positive attitudes and in providing them with a wide range of opportunities to develop their knowledge, understanding and respect for diversity and an assortment of strategies to protect themselves from bullying.

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin North Central, Labour)
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I accept that as cyberbullying is a form of bullying our response cannot be just technological. We must also deal with the reasons for bullying in the first place and we must have a whole societal response. Bullying often relates to self-esteem. There is an obvious connection between the Department of Education and Skills, the Department of Justice and Equality and the Law Reform Commission on rolling out a more comprehensive response to the problem. The Minister stated the draft report would come back by the end of November and that a proper report would be done by the end of the year. This is speedy and I congratulate the Minister on this and I welcome it. I hope when the Law Reform Commission investigates the issue of cyberbullying that it expedites the matter quickly. I suggest that a cross-departmental group would examine the issue in more detail at that point. I ask that any consultation process includes students and young people because they are most at risk. They deal with social media on a much more regular basis and they are more aware of the effects of cyberbullying on them and their peers. While the work of the Department is laudable, as Minister stated cyberbullying is a 24-seven phenomenon and the reaction to it cannot be just within the education system. It must be in conjunction with the Department of Justice and Equality and the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. The cross-departmental response to this would be more comprehensive and might get further. I ask the Minister to respond to this suggestion.

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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I thank the Deputy for the comments he has made on the progress we have initiated. We will not be able to evaluate the quality of the product until we see it in draft form at the end of this month and over Christmas when it will be published. Representatives from the Irish Secondary Schools Students Union were on the working group. We also had interdepartmental representation. The next stage will be to bring it to a wider forum and road test it to see whether it is robust enough. Perhaps on reflection, and I will return to the Deputy on this because I do not want to make a spontaneous commitment, we should review the situation in six months and see where we are and keep a monitor on it. The speed of technological change and the rapid evolution of social behaviour is such that we must think in very short bites of time compared to what would have been the case previously. Depending on the feedback, we might consider putting up a website of our own on which people could comment and interact because this is how people interact anyway. If this is the new medium, perhaps we should have a space in it to monitor what people say. I am open to comments and suggestions on this.

The big difficulty is ensuring parents know what their children are doing in this area. When the drug phenomenon broke first in this country, a generation of parents had never smoked or encountered the modern manifestations of drugs. I attended a parent teacher meeting at my son's school approximately five years ago where the local community Garda showed parents what drugs looked like and what pipes were. This is information parents would never know unless they had direct experience. Perhaps a pretty basic education for parents on what cyberbullying looks like is something we need to investigate and communicate also. Many parents simply are not aware of the way in which it occurs. They know about social media and how to use it themselves but they do not necessarily get into the spaces where bullying takes place and they have not seen it. Therefore, they do not know what to look for. We will have the report at the end of the year and we will disseminate it as widely as possible. We should also include a monitoring process to see how it will travel.

With regard to the schoolyard in its metaphysical and representational sense, in the old days bullying originated and happened in schools and it is still the place where the cause for bullying is initiated in the main, because it is where young people encounter each other. It spills out into the community and now it is 24-seven. Schools have a central role to play and they will remain central to the issue for a large number of people who have been cyberbullied. I thank Deputy for the points he has raised.