Online Safety
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-17
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Sinéad Gibney (SD), Dublin Rathdown

I thank the Minister of State for the response. The first issue I have with it is the focus on age. I raised today the topic of online safety, not online safety for children. I appreciate that, as legislators, we have a particular role to play in protecting people who cannot protect themselves as well as everyone else but if we only talk about blocking children and making things safe for children, we are not addressing online safety, because everyone else still has to deal with it. Let us talk about age assurance and bans. One of the groups in society that has digital literacy challenges that are unique from those of everyone else is older people. At some stage will we see bans for older people? What do we think about that in terms of the right to online participation and so on? The focus on age is wrong because it does not deal with the tools and the addictive nature of the tools. In all the things the Minister of State listed - and I appreciate the detail and I look forward to the detail coming out - algorithms are not mentioned. Yet, we are blue in the face on this side of the House telling the Government to fix the algorithms because they are the thing that will get closest to the business model.
One of the main issues with the proposals put forward by the EU is privacy. We will all have to hand over official documentation to enforce these bans and I am not assured by the methods people are talking about because people will essentially be handing over official documentation to states, private companies or third parties, all of which involve a raft of privacy issues. I could go on but the main issue I have is that there is corporate capture in Brussels and Dublin, which means all these beautiful shiny rules that are set out - these directives, proposals and ideas - have for years all promised to do the same thing, fix these issues and address online safety. Yet, they are carved out by the time they ever reach the end of the process and then they are simply not enforced.
The Government needs to take on big tech in Dublin and in Europe and we need to actually fix these issues, because nothing I heard gives me the comfort and feeling of safety we need to provide to the people who are calling me every day at their wits' end because of what their children are experiencing online, and what we are all experiencing online.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-17