Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I begin by thanking Senator Flynn and congratulating her on her first Private Member's Bill. What an important one it is. There is the topic we are discussing itself, but even the conversation on language and its importance matters. I congratulate the Senator's office as well for all the hard work done in respect of the essential piece of legislation before us.

The Bill is based on the Luxembourg best-practice guidelines on terminology and semantics for child protection. The framework was written to promote the use of child-protective language and was compiled by 18 international partners, including Europol, Interpol and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. All these agencies recognise and make clear within the guidelines the importance of language when it comes to how we conceptualise problems, prioritise issues and forge responses, especially when it comes to cases of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Every substitution of the term "child pornography" with "child sexual exploitation material" is a step towards Ireland and us, as legislators, being better equipped for dealing with the issue. Each of the 26 substitutions this Bill makes engenders more clarity in the way we conceptualise, define and constructively engage with ending the sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children. When I was thinking about what the language means and what pornography means, it is something that is active and that someone is engaging in. It is like it is a category of something that someone just likes and that legitimises it. Calling it child pornography legitimises it as an activity or something that is just a category of pornography. That is why it is wrong and why we need to change it. The concept that has been labelled child pornography to date is not pornography. It is an oxymoron because what it refers to could never be described as pornography.

We might talk about language, what it means and where it originates from. Pornography translates from Greek roots aspórn, meaning "prostitute" and gráphein, meaning to record. What we are talking about is not prostitution. There is not any consent. There never could be consent because we are talking about children. It is and always has been the sexual exploitation of children and the abuse of those children. This is the key point. The language we use does not just allow us to label what we see; the language we use shapes what we see because we use language as a frame to understand ideas. Clear language allows us to take clear steps to address the issues before us. What this Bill engages in, and what all our legislation should strive to engage with, is the linguistic concept of radical prescriptivism. This is the concept that language should continually improve and adapt to better suit the world we live in today. However, before we create order within the language we use, linguist Dr. Guy Deutscher suggests we must "lead through alleyways of destruction". In essence, the language we use in this Chamber and outside it should strive to articulate order within in chaos. With the exponential growth of the Internet and the platform it provides for sharing of images of children being exploited and abused, it is more important than ever that we standardise the language we use when discussing it by using a universal and standardised definition of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children. By implementing Bills such as Senator Flynn's and standardising the language we use, it offers us a chance to work in concert with our international partners to fight these heinous crimes against children. It also allows us to have a common starting point to engage with and counteract whatever new manifestations of abuse grow from the continued evolution of information and communications technologies.

I will conclude by saying we must keep it at the forefront of our minds at all times that the language we use within the Chamber is not for us but for the public. Consequently, it should be accessible to the public. As George Orwell wrote in his seminal Politics and the English Language:

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

How many times have we come in here to debate a topic, started out by saying it is a technical Bill and then followed it with drawn-out speeches of similarly dense and inaccessible language? We must remember that our role in this Chamber is not that of a lawyer or orator but a legislator. In order to perform that role properly, the public on behalf of whom we are legislating must understand what we are legislating for because the words we utter today will affect them tomorrow. It does not matter how flowery the speeches we make on various virtues or particular pieces of legislation are or how technically brilliant a piece of a Bill we bring forward in the House is. If the public do not understand it, if its aims are not clear and its language inaccurate then it is not worth the paper it is written on. I am asking Senators to support Senator Flynn's Bill and begin the process of making the language we use in this House clear, more accessible and to actually name what something is.