Online Safety: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-26 ============================================================ Linda Nelson Murray (FG), Industrial and Commercial Panel I thank Fianna Fáil for tabling this motion. I acknowledge that it is getting much cross-party support and has stimulated much debate here this morning. My colleague Deputy Keira Keogh has done a lot of work on online safety and, as she rightly says, the primary motivation and aim is securing our children's future. She has said that parents are doing their part in trying to protect their children from online dangers like pornography, cyberbullying and harmful algorithms that can lead to exploitation. Recently we have seen huge strides in online safety but we know that stronger age verification is the key to ensuring we keep young people safe online. There is overwhelming support for age limits and age verification and I urge the Government to do this in the shortest time possible. I met a lady recently called Emer Mugisha, who developed a fantastic comic book called CyberDefenders, One Wrong Click. It allows children to read, in a dyslexia- and child-friendly way, about how just one click when playing a game can cause huge harm. As parents we always feel that we need to be doing more and keeping an eye all of the time on our children online, but sometimes educating children is key. Sometimes, when we think of the online space, we think of Snapchat, Facebook and X but young children are playing games on tablets and are just as vulnerable. We need guarantees from companies like Roblox that they have the best interests of our children in mind. Now I will move on to another issue and I support what Senator Tully said in this regard. If we are going to put all of these controls on the online space and get companies to invest heavily in it, what are we going to do about the offline space to support our young people? Last Saturday, I was invited to a meeting of the Youthwork Ireland branch in Navan to talk to young people about life, politics and what is happening in Ireland right now. They raised with me the fact that young people really want the right to switch off. They said that if they are sitting at home on a Friday or Sunday evening and something pops up on an app from school or from a teacher, that can give rise to a feeling of anxiety in the pit of their stomach. They spoke of how they would like to be able to switch off from that. Perhaps there should be dedicated times at which these emails come in so that children are not getting them at times when they do not want to see them. The National Youth Council of Ireland, an organisation that I have met with in the past, also got in touch with me this week. It representatives explained that sustained, long-term investment in offline youth work is essential to addressing online harms experienced by young people. Youth work organisations build trusted voluntary relationships that create safe offline spaces where young people can share their online experiences, receive accurate information and access non-judgmental support. This is critical and investment in our young people through these spaces is vital. Youth work contributes to online safety in three key ways, providing education and guidance to help young people to navigate the digital world confidently and critically, offering responsive support when online harm or abuse occurs and creating save online environments that foster connection, resilience and well-being. The approach to online safety must be grounded in children's rights and reflect young people's lived realities. Online platforms should be safe by design and by default, not as an afterthought, with primary responsibility placed on technology companies and regulators to uphold safety standards. The online health task force reports are welcome. They recognise the importance of youth spaces and recommend stronger investment and cross-departmental co-ordination. Ultimately, reducing online harms requires not only regulation and digital literacy but meaningful investment in offline alternatives like youth centres, arts spaces, libraries and other community facilities so that young people have real-world places to go to. As Senator Clifford-Lee said, we were brought up in the age of television and there might have been a bit of Space Invaders on the Atari, but young people are exposed to so much more now. They need real-world places to belong, connect and thrive. As one young person said, we might have to sometimes be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on, to disconnect in order to reconnect. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-26/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:42+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-26