Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief again. These are excellent amendments. Senator Cassells is right. The reaction to the amendments is a sign that they are powerful amendments that would make a difference to the efficacy of the Bill. I remember being in America just before the first dotcom crash, at an event in Denver where there were people in cowboy hats telling people to ride the light on the first go of the dotcom boom. There has been a culture of rewarding risk taking. There is a culture where risk is rewarded, whereas responsibility is not. Of course, the individuals who are taking risks are doing so with the safety of other people in the context of potentially dangerous impacts and online harms that might be caused. There is quite a lot of reward, however. If the individual manages to find a new loophole or try something out and get away with it, he or she may be rewarded within that company or brought into another company and rewarded there because he or she has been shown to be willing to take risky decisions and gamble and push the limits of what might be acceptable.That is why it is really important that companies do not just absorb this within their business, as if the public were almost a testing ground for how much they can get away with. It is as if we are letting the Irish public be part of a research and development process to see how much harm they can push or how much they can try. It is important that it is not absorbed within business costs in terms of fines. It is very important that the individuals making those decisions are held responsible, as part of moving towards a culture of responsibility in online service providers.

The previous excellent amendment from those Senators around having a named person responsible for online safety is almost the flip side of it. If we have someone who is responsible for online safety and then also some of these amendments, we have some level of culpability for those who make irresponsible decisions. If that person moves to another company, that record is there that he or she has been identified. We might be going after a company but the individual who made those decisions might have been rewarded with a prime position in another company. It is really important that we identify those who have made irresponsible decisions and have outsourced risk to the public. I support the amendments.