Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I very much welcome the debate and the opportunity to discuss this very important issue. I thank my colleagues for tabling the motion. It is very poignant. I welcome the intervention by the Tánaiste, who used his platform to discuss this and described it as a public health issue. That is exactly what it is. I particularly acknowledge the work of the Minister in dealing with this issue. It was not being dealt with heretofore. There were no mechanisms by which we could address the very serious issues that are being discussed. By virtue of the fact of the establishment of the commission and the commissioner, we have the tools at our disposal to try to tackle the fallout from what is being discussed.

We spent many hours on the legislation both on Committee Stage and in the Chamber. The Bill was not guillotined. The Minister came to the House to discuss at length every single amendment and every single aspect of the Bill, to make sure she had legislation that was robust and set out to address the very serious issue of online media firms that have such control in our society and around the world. What was interesting during those debates, and the Minister alluded to it in several parts of her speech, was the extent to which we can or want to control. As the Minister well knows, at committee we heard from several representatives of young people, who came to us and said, "Do not speak down to us. Listen to our voices. Listen to how we use our mobile phones and the apps on them to actually communicate." While many of us might walk into a café or restaurant and see smartphones as reprehensible to the way we communicate in meeting one another, for many that is the manner in which they communicate. We should not scorn people for that. We should be understanding.

Equally, and here was the contradiction, those same young people then asked us to protect them from cyberbullying. On the one hand, they asked us not to curtail the manner in which they expressed themselves but, at the same time, the vulnerabilities of being online were laid bare. Young people are as exposed, and more so, than anyone. I took part in a debate on the issue of a ban last week. Before I did, my 14-year-old daughter said to me not to dare call for such a thing, and she is a responsible young teenager. Those are the voices we need to listen to as well.

On the motion before us and its call on the Government to acknowledge in policies and future allocations the harms from smartphone use, and to include action by policymakers and legislators, we acknowledge this is about a whole-of-government approach. It primarily involves the role of the media Minister and the massive steps she has taken already. We have also seen the Minister for Education, Deputy Foley, engage with social media companies. Unfortunately, as we and the Minister have learned, these guys sometimes think they are too big to deal with. We had a scenario where X and Snapchat did not bother even turning up to that meeting at the Department of Education with the Minister. Just because these companies are based here, are employing large numbers of people and paying significant amounts of tax, they should not get a free pass in respect of the controls they should be subjected to.

In that respect, a person I have met several times, Dr. Richard Hogan, who is an expert in this field, and I again acknowledge his work, has spoken extensively on the whole area of age verification. As a family psychotherapist, he is dealing with the fallout from the exposure of young people to extreme, grotesque pornography, the harms of products that are targeted at them, and the psychological damage to these young formative minds as a result.The formation of the online media safety code is extremely important. The very robust fines of up to €20 million that are being spoken of are also very important to show the seriousness of both the Government and the commissioner in respect of this. While the Minister also talked about the importance of these companies continuing to engage with the committees of this House and with the Minister herself, as I said, often, some of them have just chosen not to. They have sought to come before a committee, but only do so in private. Representatives from X would only appear before our committee online. I do not, therefore, have a lot of time for many of these larger companies that have sometimes shown a level of disdain for the Oireachtas and the work we do.

In respect of the bans and the cost of that, I support what the Minister said in terms of the difficulties in trying to ban something. I have given my own personal experience. I acknowledge that. However, we have to be forceful as well in the whole area of age verification. Ultimately, what these companies want is access to young people's minds because it is about product placement and making sure they abuse them from the point of view of targeting where the revenue needs to go in terms of money for the large companies that sponsor them. This is all about money and nothing else. In that regard, we heard from the Irish Heart Foundation and others who have appeared before us that these large companies only want access to young people's minds and, ultimately, their wallets and those of their parents. Again, I pay tribute the Minister for all the work she has done in this area.