Protection of Children (Online Age Verification) Bill 2026: Second Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-08
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Rónán Mullen (IND), National University of Ireland

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. This Bill proceeds from a number of core principles. The first is that pornography is harmful to society and access to pornography is particularly harmful to young people. We need to accept and internalise that enabling or permitting young people to access pornography is a form of child abuse, affecting not just the young people themselves but also others whom they encounter in their lives. The work of the regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, is welcome and important, but activity in the regulatory space is not sufficient and will not on its own protect young people from exposure to pornography. It is the norm in our society that we criminalise intended or reckless behaviour which causes serious harm to others, so it is past time that regulatory activity was underpinned by clear statute law under which providers of online pornography who do not ensure their content cannot be accessed by minors and who do not carry out age verification to secure this goal are guilty of a criminal offence.
People's privacy is important, but subject to the higher good of child protection. This Bill, without in anyway sympathising with pornography use, addresses privacy concerns by providing for multiple approaches to age verification. Where there is a will, there is a way. We have the strange situation where big-tech companies drag their feet and talk up the difficulties and downsides of excluding categories of people from access to their product, yet when it comes to the purchase of goods it is well within their capacity to insist that only those who make online payments, including by way of credit cards that can only be held by persons over 18, may access their services. This Bill breaks new ground in providing that the requirement of the use of such a credit card as a condition of viewing pornographic content would satisfy an age-verification requirement.
The perfect need not be the enemy of the good. Those who wish to talk down efforts to restrict access of minors to certain online content like to talk about workarounds to which young people can have resort to circumvent restrictions. The use of virtual private networks, VPNs, is frequently touted. As we are seeing with the ban on social media access in Australia concerning under-16s, the policies and mechanisms will need refinement. Indeed, they may need continual refinement in order to secure the goal of online safety. The difficulty of finding the magic bullet, the complete solution first time out, need not trouble us as long as we are clear about our core objective, and that we are committed to taking serious steps. If, as a result of enacting legislation such as that before us today, we ensure children and young people are not normally able to access pornography online, we will have begun to put a bit of much-needed smacht on the pornography industry - and what an industry it is. According to The Guardian , the global adult entertainment industry generates an estimated $78 billion to $97 billion in annual revenue. As many adult platforms are privately owned and operate discreetly, exact figures vary, but the market easily surpasses the combined revenues of traditional sectors like Hollywood and major professional sports.
Time does not permit me to get into all the detail about the harm pornography consumption does, but there is a reason this Bill focuses on preventing the harms done by pornography, separate from the many other threats to online safety which the regulator must also address. The reason for this is that the pornography industry is so vast, and it is not that the consumption of some of its content may sometimes be harmful to children; it is that all of it is always harmful to young people. Pornography being accessed by children requires a particular response. The regulator can tell a content provider to weed out harmful elements of its context. We see with social media that it is so hard to weed out the harms that many governments are proposing to restrict access altogether before a certain age. If this is true of social media, not all of which almost by definition can be directly harmful, the complete ban approach must also apply to young people and pornography access. Not only that, something more than regulatory sanction, even criminal sanction for repeated non-compliance or the failure to comply with formal notices, is needed. Exposing young people to pornography must be the crime.
Pornography and alcohol consumption are unique predictors of sexual assault victimisation for college females. The combined effects dramatically increase the odds of victimisation, and that is partly because pornography minimises sexually aggressive acts. With an increasingly higher use of porn, it is more likely than men will be more likely to rape, commit sexual assault, be sexually entitled and have hostility towards women. I am quoting studies, by the way, in all of these cases. Pornography routinely depicts the objectification of and violence towards women, and these images create abnormal sexual expectations, as we all know. Men's consumption of pornography impacts their view of women in measurable ways, including, but not limited to, objectification and acceptance of sexual mistreatment of women, etc.
As with other evils, people may not always realise what they are getting into. In Strasbourg recently at the Council of Europe, I secured various amendments to a report, Violent Pornography: A Test for Human Rights, which was adopted by the Assembly. Arising out of an amendment I tabled, it was resolved that, even where not extensively violent or extreme, the making and distributing of pornographic content may proceed and benefit from situations where participants are affected by violence, coercion and a lack of freedom, including situations of social or economic disadvantage, addiction, or where participants have been victims of abuse, and it may perpetuate all these situations. Child abusers under 21 report difficulty controlling their pornography use and often cite such as a factor leading to their abuse of other children. I could say more. Studies of the brain show that if someone is addicted to pornography they tend to have problems at work and with carrying out matters of daily living. There is a lot of talk these days about the failure of some young people to launch in life. Pornography addiction is very much part of this story.
We are up against a harmful behemoth and we must wonder at how we let such a situation develop to the point where it may seem out of control.
The extent of the industry and the challenge of curbing it should not paralyse us, however. There is something more important and powerful than the pornography industry, and that is the love that parents have for their children. We as legislators must show solidarity with those parents and guardians and take the first steps towards putting those who would expose their children to this danger where they belong, which is in the dock. That is the serious intent of the Bill. Fines by a regulator are mostly a corporate problem. Sentences by a court represent the more powerful judgment of a society on those who would harm children. Again, there will be objections that it will be difficult to prosecute certain players abroad for their involvement in exposing minors to online pornography, but in France and certain states in the US, we have seen how ALAW, a company owned by a Canadian investment fund laughably called Ethical Capital Partners, decided to suspend access to its content on its main pornography sites, all because of laws passed that require publishers of pornographic websites to implement age verification tools for visitors. It is amazing what can be done when people find the will.
This Bill is a revised version of similar legislation that I brought forward in 2024. Quite a bit has changed since. There is considerable ongoing discussion about the importance of online safety, heightened public concern and awareness. I acknowledge the work done by Coimisiún na Meán as the regulator in the online space. With all it has on, its role requiring parental controls, reporting, flagging and complaint mechanisms is important. It is undoubtedly attempting to fulfil its remit in demanding age assurance mechanisms of online platforms. To be fair to the regulator, it explicitly mandates that simple self-declaration, such as ticking a box or entering a date of birth, is not sufficient for age assurance.
There are four big problems, however. First, age assurance, which can involve age estimation mechanisms, is not the same as strict age verification. Second, it is left to the platform under the code, to some extent, to determine the precise mechanism that it uses for age assurance. Third, the commission deals mostly with online platforms headquartered in Ireland. In no sense has it universal jurisdiction to make demands and secure the accountability of platforms and websites providing pornography online to users capable of accessing it in Ireland. Fourth, regulation, even with the power to impose fines or to demand actions, is more vague. It invites tech companies and platforms to play to ducks and drakes and, in the end, lacks the focus and, to use an old word, lacks the exemplarity of criminal law.
On the numerous occasions that Coimisiún na Meán has come before the Oireachtas joint committee on which I sit, it has not been able to reassure us that persons under 18 are no longer able to access pornography in Ireland. It remains the case that if you want to buy a pair of shoes, you must in all likelihood use a credit card and therefore are subject to a higher degree of scrutiny than if you want to view pornography. That is because the pornography industry thrives on putting out free content already harmful to people, on the back of which they can mine data, sell advertising and make online sales. When I brought the previous version of this Bill before the House in 2024, the then Minister noted that in some US states pornography providers had gone offline but that, unlike those states, member states of the EU were not free to act alone. The Minister invoked the country-of-origin principle and said that Ireland could not unilaterally act nor should it. That situation seems to have changed because France, for one, has shown, as I understand it, that it is not bound by the terms of another member state's regulation of platforms that happen to be headquartered in that other member state. In France, platforms that fail to implement approved privacy preserving systems risk fines of up to 2% of their global revenue or nationwide blocking by Internet service providers.
It is fair to say that, while it pursues objectives in this area, the European Union has avoided any suggestion that it would block member states from tailoring legislation or regulation for their own jurisdictions. I am not saying that Ireland should not continue to interact with our EU counterparts, but I do not believe we are restricted from introducing criminal offences as this Bill proposes to do. In this case, in interacting with platforms and online service providers on age assurance mechanisms and requirements, the coimisiún would have to take on board what age verification would now mean under this Bill were it to be enacted. Of course, online providers not currently subject to the writ of Coimisiún na Meán would have to consider the implications of the legislation for themselves.
Regarding this Bill, it has a wide reach because it is aimed at anyone who is responsible to any extent for determining, controlling, hosting or sharing content on a website. It is aimed at app store services and any provider of an online service that facilitates the creation or generation of pornographic content online, including by way of AI. The obligation is to ensure that pornographic content is not accessible to any person in the State under 18 and to require any person accessing pornographic content through these services to fulfil age verification requirements. The definition of pornographic content is careful to ensure that depictions of sexual activity that would occur, for example, in artistic or informational contexts that would not be objectionable are not caught by this legislation. The Minister of State will know there are concerns abroad about the State acting as a gatekeeper and identity checker and about the dangers of a "papers, please" approach to access to the Internet. This Bill addresses those concerns by providing that the Minister may designate certain classes of documents that can be used for age verification services. Those who are concerned about the access of third parties may note that there are strict limitations in the Bill on how, when and to what extent age verification data can be shared.
I will conclude on this point and let my seconder speak. As a core principle, the securing of privacy for those wishing to access pornography must come second always to the cause of protecting children from exposure to pornography. I will resume on that point later. I thank my seconder in advance.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-07-08/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:10+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-08