Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I note what Senator Rabbitte and others had to say about Internet safety day. I want to welcome and endorse everything the Senator said. I listened to Alex Cooney of CyberSafeKids this morning who pointed out that more than half of children have no restriction on their online activity and 90% of eight to 12-year-olds are active online. I looked up the CyberSafeKids guide to parental controls. Of course it is good as far as it goes. CyberSafeKids and organisations like it are independent of big tech. However, I wonder at their timidity and the timidity of many guardians of the public good who appear not to be willing to say what needs to be said about young people and their online world.

The guide talks about the risks but then points out the benefits for children of social media and the online world. Reference is made to socialising, learning or developing creative skills. This type of talk sounds to me like what the big tech people from Meta and TikTok had to say to the Joint Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport. Of course there are benefits of a kind to be found, but these benefits are to be found elsewhere. Surely the big story that CyberSafeKids needs to share with us is that the risks can now be seen to far outweigh the benefits. The big story is that we need to get children offline. The big big story is one which it will not dare say but which is the truth.

Regarding the CyberSafeKids guide to parenting and all of the things parents are expected to do, many parents do not have the time or the resources or, frankly, the ability to guide their children, in particular their young children, safely through this very complex online world. We need to listen to people like Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist. For anyone who is interested, there was an excellent interview with him on BBC 4 last Thursday. It is very clear from listening to him and others that we need to work towards a screen-free world for young children. The idea that every child should have a computer screen in class is, we now know, a bad one because they get distracted and go to other places. Parents then discover late in the day that the same devices that their children use for supposedly educational purposes in school are the same devices they are able to navigate around into distracting activities when they are at home.

The reality is that we need to make life a lot easier for parents and families by being courageous enough to say clearly what is needed and to legislate so the principals in schools are able to say, "Sorry, no phones whatsoever in school. Don't not blame us. It is now the law". That that is why the Ministers to date have been far too timid. They need to follow the example of other countries and say that we are going to legislate and not wait for Europe to legislate to ban those aged under 16 from social media. Of course, there is plenty more to be done on pornography, which I have spoken about before and will return to again. I note all of the good work that has been done, but we need to be much more courageous and determined about protecting children in the online space.