Online Safety Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-27 ============================================================ Charlie McConalogue (FF), Donegal I join in welcoming the group from the Skerries Educate Together national school. I hope that they all enjoy a tour of the Dáil and their day here. I thank Senator Gallagher for raising this matter. I also thank him for providing the real-life experience and feedback given by Mr. McCague, principal of St. Macartan's College at a presentation. The feedback has been presented in a very authentic way and is totally based on the principal's experience of education and working with young people. I thank the Senator for outlining the feedback on the six indicators of well-being, including respect, and the potential impact on all that by social media. He outlined how the principal said that students insult each other online in a way that would never previously happen in real life. I am sure that all of us in politics, and all of us as adults, can see how adults do the same and say things online that would never be said in public. Indeed, many of the people who are most vociferous and most insulting online would, whenever met in person, would not say "Boo" to a goose. I would often wonder if they are entirely different people. We can see how social media has that impact on adults who grew up in a non-social media environment and whose development was not impacted by growing up with social media. We can only imagine how challenging social media is for younger people who have yet to develop and are in the development process, and how social media impacts their long-term development and well-being, and their well-being in school. Online safety, in particular for young people, is a priority for the Government. As online safety touches all aspects of life, it is a whole-of-society issue and a whole-of-government issue. Our approach to protecting children online is to regulate access to content, rather than access to equipment, and to promote safety by design, for example, regulating how recommender systems are delivered to users. The Government believes that this is the most effective way to secure meaningful online safety. That approach is embodied in Ireland’s online safety framework, with Coimisiún na Meán at its heart. It includes the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022, the EU’s Digital Services Act and the online safety code. Together, these have a variety of provisions designed to protect children and young people from seeing illegal and harmful content online. For example, the online safety code obliges designated video-sharing platforms, including YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, to ensure that people under the age of 18 do not have access to adult-only content such as pornography and gratuitous violence. The platforms are required to have robust age-assurance measures to ensure compliance. Looking ahead, the new national strategy on digital and AI was published in February and includes a chapter dedicated to online safety. It commits the Government to explore options with other EU member states to introduce age restrictions on the use of social media, concentrating on those under the age of 16. Our preference is for an EU-wide approach to a digital age of majority because it makes it more straightforward for platforms to comply and for regulators to supervise and enforce. For now, the Government does not have plans to ban smartphones. This is a thorny area and would potentially be difficult to monitor and enforce. For example, it is not clear how the owner of a smartphone could be identified or where the liability for a breach should lie. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that many parents and guardians rely on smartphones to check in with their children during the day. This is why we take the approach of regulating access to content rather than to equipment. Of course, online safety is not just a matter for regulation. For example, in 2024, the Department of Education issued the keeping childhood smartphone free policy to provide guidance on access for primary school pupils. Similarly, there is a circular that requires recognised primary schools to ban the use of personal mobile phones for the duration of the school day. --- 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/2026-05-27/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:00+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-27