Protection of Children (Online Age Verification) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-08 ============================================================ Rónán Mullen (IND), National University of Ireland I thank the Minister of State for his reply. I also thank all the Senators who spoke, namely Senators Sarah O'Reilly, Rabbitte, Ní Chuilinn, Tully and Scahill. The Minister of State did not comment on the core idea of the Bill, namely that criminal liability should attach to people who fail to prevent minors from accessing pornography. While I accept the general good wishes of everybody here, the Government is speaking out of both sides of its mouth. The Minister of State professes to be concerned about protecting children from pornography. He promises something in the future by way of a solution, but his contribution was full of references to privacy and protecting privacy. Protecting children is not an absolute priority for the Government on this one. That is because it is so hidebound. In the end, what the Minister of State is talking about protecting is the privacy of adults who freely choose to go online to access pornography. I am not out – nor is this Bill - to attack their privacy rights, but the Government is putting those rights ahead of what is needed right now in order to protect children from being able to access pornography. That seems to be a bizarre situation. We cannot have a bureaucracy-as-usual approach to this problem. The problem is urgent. Children are being damaged now. Pornography serves no social good that anybody in this room can identify, yet the Minister of State is so worried about approaches that would require digital age verification that would involve the storage of data, which people would freely choose to upload or provide to a third party in order that they can access pornography. He is so worried about adult privacy rights that he is not willing to commit to what is needed to protect children from being able to access pornography now. There is one thing the Minister of State did not say. He said that there is already existing online safety regulation restricting access to pornography, but is it working? He did not make one iota of a claim to the effect that it is working. Right now, children are able to access pornography online and the Minister of State is telling me we already have a solution to this and we are working on a better one. In the meantime, we dare not act because the European Union might not let us. That is not going to endear the European Union to parents across this country if it is true that it is preventing the Government from acting in the way the Bill proposes. It is a fig leaf of an excuse. We saw the French act in such a way that they were able to design their measure around age verification. This Government is timid on this issue. If the future proposal is on an age verification mechanism in the context of an app, that is well and good, but right now the Government is not dealing with the problem. The Minister of State has not answered the core question relating to the Bill, which is whether the Government agrees that it should be a criminal offence to fail to ensure that under-age persons can access online pornography. Insofar as Coimisiún na Meán is concerned, this Bill excludes nothing in its approach. There is nothing to stop the coimisiún from being the organisation which, through the Minister, would designate certain documents as satisfying the requirement of age verification. What this Bill seeks to establish is what has always been the case where people engage in conducts that harm other people - that it would be a criminal offence. Right now, it is not a criminal offence to fail to ensure that children under the age of 18 cannot access pornography. That is a disgrace. The Government is continuing to disappoint people. The Minister of State was speaking out of both sides of his mouth when he said the Government is concerned about children and well done on this Bill, which we are not going to oppose but there are all these problems, especially around the privacy of people who want to freely go online and choose to access pornography. It is quite clear where the Government's priorities lie in respect of this. That is very much to be regretted. I will make one final point. This Bill does not address the general question of adults accessing pornography, an activity that has no social utility. That is a problem which requires another social response. In the vanguard of demanding that response are the many women and feminist groups across the country that see the damage pornography is doing to relationships between men and women, although the dangers extend to men, women and children, family life and so on. It is not unreasonable or naive to hope that the day might come when pornography might not be available at all online but would be driven into the offline space. We would not be damaging free expression if we allow people certain access to pornography in the offline space. If we treat the online space as so difficult to manage in such a way that we can protect innocent users of that online space from being harmed, we would have a different attitude to what should or should not be allowed in the online space. That is a debate for another day. For now, I can only regret that the Government has not clearly committed to supporting the principle that it must be a criminal offence, in addition to Coimisiún na Meán's regulatory work, to fail to carry out age verification and to fail to ensure that under-18s may not access pornography online. --- 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