Protection of Children (Online Age Verification) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-08 ============================================================ Evanne Ní Chuilinn (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach Gabhaim buíochas leis an Leas-Chathaoirleach. I welcome my guests to the Gallery. We are talking about the safety of children, minors and juveniles but these women have been keeping my children and the children of Crumlin safe for decades. I hope they have a meal later on in the restaurant. I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber for this debate and congratulate Senator Mullen on his Bill, which is progressing nicely. I welcome the premise of the Bill. It aligns with the work of the joint Oireachtas committee on media and communications, with components of our recent report, as the Senator and Minister of State know, on online safety, regulation and participation. We have to stop these huge online platforms having unfettered access to our children and promoting material that is harmful and dangerous. This Bill seeks to achieve this, so I commend the Senator for his work on it. Pornography is becoming more, not less, accessible for children as companies increasingly find new and innovative ways of producing, promoting and disseminating adult content across not just traditional websites, but otherwise normal platforms and social media websites as well. These platforms claim to have robust systems and measures in place, but very often, these measures are really just you ticking a box or filling out a form where you can say you are over 18. We have to do more and this Bill advances that policy conversation. It should be welcomed for that reason. If we ask ourselves why we need to act, there is a clear link between exposure to pornography - in particular, violent pornography - and increased sexual violence, distorted sexual expectations as well as increasing misogynistic attitudes. These links are clear for all who have problematic pornography use, but especially so for our children who are becoming exposed to pornography at increasingly younger ages. The Bill aligns with the recommendations of the joint Oireachtas committee to implement an age classification system. I welcome this. Our committee spent months discussing these and other issues with experts, advocacy groups, children's rights advocates and technology companies themselves. The Bill also aligns with recommendation 4 on combating image-based abuse by explicitly referencing the generation of pornographic material, which would cover AI-generated content, ensuring that children do not have access to harmful AI-generated pornographic content. There is, as the Minister of State will know, a legislative and regulatory framework in place at European and national level that has made significant progress in recent years. The Digital Services Act, DSA, is a landmark piece of European legislation that acknowledges that, as a Union, we must act to ensure safety for all, but especially children, in the digital space. The DSA puts an obligation on platforms to have robust age verification measures in place, and as recently as March of this year, the Commission initiated enforcement proceedings against four providers for failing to protect children from accessing pornography. It is clear, though, that there are still gaps in regard to the enforceability of these measures, as many of these platforms simply have a one-click verification process still in place. We cannot accept that that is robust, as the DSA prescribes. The Bill is a welcome addition to the regulatory framework but it does require some changes. This Bill is broadly welcome and seeks to legislate for a far more robust framework for regulating age verification that will be an improvement on simple, one-click measures which are currently the norm. However, I am concerned that in its current form the Bill would legislate for excessive disclosure of data to technology companies and impose an unnecessary requirement to hold this data for five years. In any age verification measure, we must ensure that any data disclosure requirement respects privacy rights and is proportionate to the risks involved. The Bill also does not utilise the expertise that already exists in our media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, with no role set out for Coimisiún na Meán. With some amendments we could, through this legislation, empower Coimisiún na Meán to take a much more active role in the enforcement of any age verification regulations. The Bill progresses the conversation on this topic by placing the focus on real, robust, enforceable verification, which is a marked improvement on the current box-ticking landscape we have already referenced. I know the Minister of State agrees on the need for a more robust approach, as is demonstrated by the development of a new tool that would achieve age verification without disclosing users' data by his Department. I hope that as a group of Senators and a group in the Oireachtas, we can work together to place that tool under this or similar legislative footing with the necessary amendments on Committee Stage. --- 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/2026-07-08/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:10+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-08