Catherine Noone (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This morning, at the Joint Committee on Children and Youth Affairs, the ISPCC attended and gave an informative presentation. It was as frightening as it was informative as to the range of difficulties being experienced when it comes to cyberbullying. Cyberbullying encompasses all sorts of activities such as stalking online, grooming, bullying and targeting by companies and individuals of young and vulnerable children. I appreciate that in many instances children are way ahead of adults when it comes to technology but we as legislators and policy-makers need to regulate app companies. The reality is that Facebook, Twitter and the like get the difficulty here, they are much more in tune with it and they have policies, but it is the smaller operators who target children for their own gain that we need to get on top of. They recommended the Office for Internet Safety be set up with a digital safety commissioner, which needs to be done without delay.

At the end of the day, we cannot be negative about the Internet, it is a fantastic tool. It has advanced education and everything else, probably in many instances beyond where we would like it to be. It is a phenomenon that we are happier with than without. We need to legislate to make it very difficult for these app companies and companies in general to be able to target children in this way. The software that exists to target them should be actively used to avoid them in many instances. I would welcome a debate on this important issue with the Minister in the near future.