Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is a pleasure to welcome the Minister here and, as others have done, to commend the work she has done in this sphere and her commitment to reform in this area. I congratulate my colleague, Senator Seery Kearney, and her assistant with the motion, Senator Dolan, on the work they did to prepare it. I thank them for it. I am not sufficiently narcissistic to claim that I might even have submitted the amendment or that I would have written it myself. I thank them for that great work. I also thank other colleagues like Senator Cummins who pitched in on this important motion.

Personally, I am clearly in support of the motion. I come at this from two perspectives. I am a parent of three children. They are big children now but I have lived through all of this stuff with the phones and all of the gadgetry. I am also a former teacher. Like all colleagues, I interact with people on a day-to-day basis. These are the factors that inform my contribution.

I support the motion. It is extremely timely, worthy and excellent. I support in particular the proposed ban on smartphone ownership by children below the age of 13. This would support parents and the children themselves. It would be an excellent initiative. It is not always easy to police, administer and legislate but it is a worthy exercise. We do it with cigarettes and drink and we should do it with smartphones.

As legislators, we must take decisive action to protect the well-being of our youth in the digital age. The concerns raised in this motion are very similar to the findings in the recent report I did. As you know, Acting Chair, I have been a long-standing member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I brought forward a report to the Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development. I was rapporteur for a report on children and how they are affected by online violence, of which pornography is a subset, and abuse. The report was accepted by the committee of the Council of Europe. Last Friday, I took it to a plenary of the entire assembly where it was unanimously passed. There were 20 contributions from the floor on it. The President of the assembly was in attendance and listened to the debate. The report has gone now to the Committee of Ministers. I hope it will complement domestic actions by Ministers here. I understand it will be communicated by some channels in the EU as well.I understand it is communicated by some channel to the EU as well. It is going to the committee of ministers of the Council of Europe which is effectively a committee of the foreign ministers of each country, generally represented by the ambassadors. Implicit in it would be that we would join the Lanzarote convention. The Minister might respond on this but it is my understanding that we are already a party to that convention. There is also a Bulgarian convention in this area. I ask the Minister to respond on where we are in terms of international conventions and accepting them.

Given the alarming increase in online danger and digital violence against children, we must prioritise the implementation of comprehensive risk mitigation measures, including age verification. The obvious thing is to ban phones up to the age of 13, but after that age and at all times there should be age verification on devices. This needs to be negotiated with the technology companies and to be enshrined in legislation. The companies need to be made to pay a penalty if they do not do it. As with the gambling sphere, there must to be age verification. It is not beyond the capacity of these people to implement age verification. That is the very first risk mitigation measure that must be adopted. Obviously there is the issue of the age at which children are given access to phones, which is implicit in the motion.

There must be penalties. While we need a consultative process with the technology companies, we also need a punitive system that will disincentivise them. We also need educational support. It must be part of our education system to empower children to recognise things that they should not be involved with and to make informed and good decisions in that regard. That involves proper sex education in schools and education on this whole area. We need an holistic approach. We need to commit to this in terms of penalties. We also need to collect data and ensure co-operation with Interpol and other international bodies in order to police the digital arena and detect the perpetrators of abuse and pornography online.

Our time is limited today but this is an issue to which we should return. I commend the proposers of the motion and am very proud to be a signatory to it.