Kathryn Reilly (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. Some of my comments will be around the digital agenda for Europe as part of Horizon 2020. The European Commission figures suggest that the app-economy workforce will rise by 4.8 million by 2018 with revenues more than tripling to €63 billion. We also know around 90% of jobs by 2020 will require workers to have skills in information and communication technologies. Therefore, as Europe becomes an increasingly fertile ground for digital content and applications, this infrastructure will enable Europeans to distribute their creations globally.

When I was researching for this debate, I looked at the Horizon 2020 website and its section on the digital agenda which led me to different issues, one of them being cyber security. While I do not know whether cyber security falls under the remit of the Minister of State, I will mention it briefly because it comes under the broad umbrella of Horizon 2020, and I wanted to raise the topic. In the communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, and as part of cyber security, there is a strategy for better Internet safety for children. The strategy recommends that industry should be encouraged to take steps, including proactive measures, to remove child sex abuse material from the Internet, which is pertinent in the wake of the announcement by UPC the other week. Some concerns have been raised about such systems because they would raise significant privacy and data protection issues that have not been addressed, particularly as what is envisaged is a self-regulatory system that does not have a legislative basis or judicial oversight.

While removing the paedo-pornographic content from the Internet is vital and needed to combat child abuse worldwide, the term "preventing viewing" could refer to filters installed and controlled by end users or a network-wide blocking of websites. As has been pointed out by many experts, a network-wide blocking of websites raises serious concerns about fundamental rights and freedoms. In 2010, the European Data Protection Supervisor, when discussing these issues, mentioned a need to have appropriate safeguards to ensure that monitoring or blocking would only be done in a targeted way under judicial control and that there would not be a misuse of the mechanism. Given that the function of filtering or blocking is carried out by external actors, that raises issues of transparency, accountability and legitimacy and calls them into question.

The particular relevance of that to this debate and the digital agenda is the issue of mission creep, in that other content could be brought within the scope of blocking or filtering and the objective could move beyond that of crime prevention to take on other roles. As such, the need for categories of appropriate content should be clearly and precisely defined to prevent the excessive application of filtering and to ensure proportionality. I raise this issue because it has been argued that filtering is not conducive to the positive developments that ICT can facilitate, such as innovation and stronger democracies. The Minister of State also referred to how evidence showed that many of the recent productivity gains stemmed from innovation. With this in mind, there is a concern that filtering could lead to mission creep, thereby inhibiting some of the innovations that we would like to see in the digital field.

A broadly based group of stakeholders meets every four to six weeks under the chairmanship of the Minister of State's Department to oversee the implementation and further development of the national strategy for Horizon 2020. In terms of monitoring, are the outcomes of these meetings published on the Department's website or elsewhere?

The Government is encouraging small to medium-sized enterprises, SMEs, to engage in large collaborative projects or to seek support through the dedicated SME instrument for highly innovative smaller companies. On what basis has this approach been agreed and do SMEs have a successful track record in collaborative projects in this setting?

I thank the Minister of State for all his work.