Sharon Keogan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is very welcome to the Chamber. The Bill has been in the works for some time and will bring about drastic change for people and companies working in broadcasting and streaming. It will affect everyone in the country in some way. It is a large Bill and at times a technical one, but its main effects are laid out in an accessible manner. It will result in the replacement of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland with the new Coimisiún na Meán, whose remit will extend beyond that of the BAI into the realm of audiovisual on-demand media services or streaming to the layman, and also into social media, which the Bill calls a relevant online service for the time being.

I am going to stick to some of the terms that everybody knows. This Bill comes about because of a debate that has happened in the western hemisphere in recent years. It was largely kick-started in 2016 by the cultural fallout from Brexit and the presidential election in the United States, the crux of which was that people behaved poorly online and what was to be done about it. This primarily is a moral issue; someone with no love of neighbour does not care what harm they bring to others, but since we cannot legislate that everyone be moral, then here we are.

I will take some aspects of the Bill in order of appearance. Section 35, which amends section 123 of the principal Act, allows the commission to receive funding from the television licence fee, joining RTÉ and TG4 as the recipients of such. I do not know how TG4 feels about sharing the pie, but RTÉ has spent recent years having a good moan about how the €200 million a year that gets spent from the fee is simply not enough. It has continually held out the begging bowl to successive Governments. Most companies, families and individuals might have to look at costs and expenses and engage in a bit of budgeting to make ends meet when times are tough, but then for most companies, it is not illegal to not pay for the service that you did not ask for and do not use. There was some talk of a broadcasting levy which would be applied to every household, rather than only those with a television. Let us all be glad that was not the route taken. Instead, we are going to put a levy on Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video and Disney Plus - the companies that make the content that people want to pay for - and radio stations and social media companies, which they will pay to the commission for the privilege of being regulated in the hope that some money will be put in their coffers.

Part 2 of the Bill is where things get more worrying than ridiculous. It relates to online safety. Before I talk about harmful online content, I want to mention section 139D, which relates to age-inappropriate online content. I am so glad that it is in the Bill. Very few parents have any idea of what children see online. Children are given a phone, sometimes as young as six or seven, and they are left alone with it day and night with unrestricted Internet access. That is not okay.I am so sick and tired of the blind eye being turned when it comes to the harm this is doing to the children the length and breadth of this country. From constant exposure to cyberbullying, to unrealistic body imagery for young girls leading to low self-esteem and eating disorders, to one-click access to hard-core pornography which desensitises, to the oversexualisation of young people, to direct messages from anonymous accounts on TikTok, Instagram and Discord, asking them for photos. The list goes on and on. Parents are not doing their job at protecting their children from the Internet. That is a fact. This will not be a very popular statement, because we do not like to criticise parents, but this is too important, and we must call it out. That, of course, is the role of the parent; to raise, nurture and protect their child. It is less so the relationship between the Government and its citizens and yet, that is what the Government is seeking to do with this Bill. It is to make the media commission the saviour of grown adults nationwide by saving them from offence.

Alongside the serious issues of self-harm, suicide and eating disorders is the definition of "harmful online content" as online content which "humiliates another person". Under this Bill, if someone tweets something which I feel humiliates me, I can ask Twitter to take it down. If it does not do so, I can go to the media commission, tell the commission that it is negatively impacting my mental health and the commission will order it to be taken down. This is the teacher making sure that the kids play nice in the yard, scaled up to the entire online presence of everyone in the country.

Bullying is a different story. It carries with it the idea of behaviour that is targeted and repeated. There is no such provision in this Bill. There can be a once-off occasion and, just like that, this organ of the State will swoop in and make sure that no one’s feelings ever get hurt. The role of the State is to protect our rights, not our feelings. We are in the very early Stages of this Bill. I welcome the provisions of this Bill, particularly those that protect our children. However, I also have serious concerns on the possible overreach of the commission in restricting freedom of speech online. I look forward to working with the proposers on Committee Stage, when I will table amendments to ensure the continued existence of freedom of speech in this country.