Online Safety: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-26 ============================================================ Joe Flaherty (FF), Nominated by the Taoiseach Senator Duffy and I have the same hairstyle. I too welcome the students from St. Louis school in Dundalk. As we listen to the debate, it strikes me that we ought to have students from St. Louis and other schools discussing this very important motion here today. I am particularly happy that we have said we will not ban social media for people aged under 16 in this country. From having three daughters, I have come to realise how important social media is to them. If we reflect on a time when I was growing up, we all went out and played football in a field. If I tell young people about that now they would nearly laugh because they do not do that. We have created a situation whereby we stopped allowing our children to go out and play in the street. We fostered the situation and have completely changed the landscape for young people, and where they go and how they communicate. Like the pupils from St. Louis here today, today's generation are now not only digital natives but are completely immersed in the digital world and see it as a key component of their lives. We have to reflect on what Covid did to many young people in terms of isolation, in particular young people who may have had a small circle of friends, or only one or possibly no friends at all in school. Covid was detrimental. For them, social media and the online world was the only way they were able to continue to communicate with friends. Social media and the online world is viewed as being a big bad wolf, but we also have to realise that we now have a generation which has embraced this, along with AI, and also see the ills and pitfalls of AI. This debate tends to get hysterical and we worry unduly and too much. Sometimes we have to have faith in young people and in the next generation that they can make the right decisions. My colleague spoke about algorithms and the suggestion that companies have to give Governments access to them. It would be more dangerous to give such information to governments than allowing companies to access it. That is an aside. There is a class action under way in the US, where Meta is being taken to court. The nub of the case is that Meta made its product too addictive. Those who have a shop want people to come into it and if they become addicted to going into it they are quite happy. It is difficult to understand the logic of the case that Meta has made Facebook too addictive. Everybody scrolls on their screens to excess. We have to realise that there has to be a balance. AI will transform a lot of what we do in the world. It will transform many things we do very well. It will help with isolation, healthcare, the delivery of education and many other fields. While we have to be mindful of it and ready to stand up and take issue with the industry when the time is right, we also have to realise the important and key role Ireland has played in the emergence of AI. As a society and country, we will play a pivotal role in the future development of AI. That is a positive and affirmative good, in that some of our most able and capable digital natives will go on to play a key role in the development of what will be AI mark III, the next generation of AI. The difficulty for us as we deal with IT, social media and the AI world is that the products we see today are ones that were developed five or six years ago. At any given time, Apple has at least two futuristic phone models it has worked on, developed and could unleash on the market today. It wants to get the maximum value out of the iPhone 14 or whatever the current model is, and will then develop the next one. We think this is the cutting edge and the worst AI can get is what we are seeing at the minute, but the reality is that businesses and investors have moved significantly ahead of that. In many respects, we are probably chasing the horse after the stable door has been opened. I welcome the conversation on this and the fact that Ireland taking a very proactive role. We will have a key role to play in this space as part of our role in the European Presidency. I see Ireland as being a statesmanlike figure in terms of the issues we face in Ukraine and the Middle East. I would like to see the Presidency being defined by Ireland leading the EU in taking a strong stance on AI and its future development and on international affairs. --- 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