Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the members of Fórsa. I have gone to bat against Fórsa in the WRC on many an occasion.

I acknowledge the Minister’s remarks and all the work she has done, which clearly is felt across this House.

There was a time when everybody smoked in all of the movies. In fact, they did it to promote them. That was what being cool looked like. Then there were decades where there were warnings that smoking was a public health issue. It was not believed and cases were taken. We then brought in and led the way on no smoking at work, and we then had to legislate for no smoking in cars. Now it would be seen anathema to any child protection that there would be smoking in the face or around children.

Social media and the ownership of smartphones is exactly the same. We are talking about the mental health of whole generations, not just the young generation coming up but adults across our nation. The fact is that there is profit here. There are companies at the heart of all of this. The likes of Google threatened the Australian state when they talked about bringing in laws. These companies are bigger than nation-states and they wield power. We have to legislate in the interests of our people and in the interests of the mental health of our generations coming up.

I wish to acknowledge that I work closely in this area and have done in recent months with three men in particular, namely, Roger Cowan of Security is Your Business, Aaron O’Grady of Future Horizons, and Paul McCarthy, a cybersecurity expert. The talk much about cognitive security, cognitive resilience and the fact there is behaviour modification going on in the use of smartphones. There is behaviour modification going on in the use of social media and that needs to be arrested and stopped. We need to expose what is going on and the mental health implications of it.

Phones are useful if children have separated parents or if children need to be contactable going home on buses and so on, but they do not need to be smartphones. There are flip phones. If we were to ban smartphones, there would be an immediate pivot in the production of phones towards phones to be sold for minors. It is not a fact that they all must have smartphones. I do not agree with this idea of a competency or a freedom of movement issue. It does not hold up for alcohol or other areas that we legislate for. I do not concur with that.

I agree that we had a little bit of difficulty regarding which Minister would respond to this and who is responsible. We reckoned the Minister, Deputy Martin, happened to be the most appropriate. I agree that the issue cuts across a number of Departments. The Minister’s contribution and response suggests that I need to continue in the ear of the Taoiseach about this. We cannot have digital age falling down between two stools, where Coimisiún na Meán has a whole heap of regulatory powers and the Data Protection Commission is responsible for processing data but is too occupied in other areas to be able take individual complaints of children being targeted, and the fact is that they are microtargeted. There should be mandatory education; it should not be just merely optional. Parents are not time-rich; rather they are time-poor. Therefore, as a consequence, it is up to us to take all of the action on their part.

Sponsorship should not be allowed by any of these companies. We should take the same attitude as we do with gambling in sport and alcohol around sport. It is in their interest to be associated, child-friendly and promoting their own interests. However, the fact is that children have access to porn at very young ages. That was brought up by the young people yesterday. In France, parental controls are the default setting on devices. That is where we need to move to and those are the sort of things we are moving to.

I am not Luddite; I agree with smart technology being available as a resource for school projects, for education and for all of those things. The assistive technology for children with special needs and so on are excellent. However, it is this free-for-all use where we just allow it to happen and say it will be too difficult to legislate for that I do not agree with. There is an onus on us to ensure we are radical, we are leading and we are protecting the public health issue here.

We need longitudinal studies and public health measures. We need to ensure we are implementing measures based on these correlations. The facts show that the prevalence of depression, mental illness and anxiety is up. All of these are correlated to the ownership and prevalence of smartphones, and it is getting worse by the year. It is too late 30 years from now to say, “I wish we had done something.” We should be leading and we should be doing it now.