Joe O'Toole (Independent)

——because we thought this was just politicking with two parties in Government trying to establish their different identities going into a general election. We thought this was just an attempt to win back headlines in a week when things were going in the wrong direction. The Leader may explain this to the House in her reply.

It has come to my attention recently that the names of primary and post-primary school websites have been taken over by people in other countries and are being used as a conduit into pornographic websites. The only way to stop this is to protect the names of the schools. The name of every town in Ireland is protected on the .ie domain. One cannot enter dingle.ie or even andaingean.ie and try to do something wrong with it as it will not be accepted. It is a protected name on the .ie domain but this is not the case on the .com domain and other domains.

It should be brought to the attention of the Department of Education and Science that a threat exists. The Department could register the name of every school in Ireland with a .ie domain and it is then protected, or else give the name of every school in Ireland — at no cost — to the people in charge of the .ie domain. The name of every school is then protected and cannot be used by anybody else for any other purpose.

This House has regularly debated the dangers of the Internet and the dangers of access. We can take simple steps and this is one of them which would be very useful. People like to look up the website of the local school or their own school and this would be a simple way of protecting them. I ask that the name of every school and educational institution in the country be registered to protect the names from being used by people who have devious reasons for doing so.