Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit, an Teachta McConalogue. The Minister of State is very welcome. I thank him for taking time out of his busy schedule to be here.

I attended a meeting of the local sports partnership at the Monaghan Peace Campus last Friday, where two schools, the Model National School and St. Macartan's College, gave presentations. The Model National School gave a presentation on road safety, and St. Macartan's College gave a presentation on social media.

The St. Macartan’s school principal is a gentleman by the name of David McCague. St. Macartan's is an all-boys secondary school. Mr. McCague gave a powerful presentation on the impact that social media is having on young people, and he sees it daily as a school principal. He said that social media should be named anti-social media. His fear is that we would look back on this era with great sadness and regret that we have not done more to protect our young people from the evils of social media.

I would like to read out an extract from the presentation that he made, which floored everyone who heard it on that day. It states:

Social media is an impediment to all of the investment of time and focus in schools on Student Wellbeing. Social Media acts as a counter point to the learning opportunities afforded to students in school.

There are 6 Junior Cycle Indicators of wellbeing [connection, respected, aware, resilient, active and responsible] and each one of them is being challenged directly by adolescent use of social media.

1. Connection - social media actually diminishes true connection. It creates virtual and false connections between young people and replaces the authentic friendships that they should be forming in their adolescence.

2. Respected - the base level of communication between adolescents is horrific. They are insulting each other at a level that would shock people. Young people will type something that they would never say to somebody’s face. They do not see the consequences of these words, images so therefore they do not consider them. It is common place for young people to tell each other to go kill themselves via social media - unfortunately this is a trigger for poor mental health, low self-esteem, depression and often suicidal ideation. Furthermore - their role models/influences are role modelling misogyny, toxic masculinity and dangerous moral values.

3. Aware - young people are now very unaware of what is real and what is false. They cannot critically evaluate the validity of sources or information causing confusion, false impressions, misplaced trust and a sense of confusion on what is right and what is wrong. They are not aware of what is acceptable or unacceptable - if it appears acceptable on social media therefore it must be.

4. Resilient - young people’s dependency on validation online leads to a lack of resilience. Their need to conform to the idealistic images on social media means that their failure to meet these expectations results in collapse and sensationalising of their unique deficiencies.

5. Active - young people now relax with the phone in their hand scrolling and viewing social media - this is often at the expense of moving and exercising contributing to the rise in obesity and issues like poor posture and eye strain.

6. Responsible - social media promotes irresponsibility and a lack of self-discipline. There is no regulation - there are no consequences for breaching a code of conduct. The availability of illicit images promotes irresponsibility.

The ban on phones in schools was a welcome act but it needs to go further. We need to prohibit students who are under 16 years of age from having access to a smartphones. It is deeply affecting the moral fibre of our young people, their mental health, their ability to forge authentic connections and their ability to decode what is real, false, right and wrong.

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.

Go raibh maith ag an Aire Stáit and I thank the Minister of State for his response. The presentation made by the principal of St. Macartan's College, an all-boys secondary school, last Friday is one of the most powerful presentations that I have heard in all my years in this House. Everyone who was present was saddened, shocked, alarmed and fearful of the effect that social media is having on schools. The principals and teachers in all schools are at the coalface in that they are dealing with the effects of it on a daily basis. Some of the examples outlined by Mr. McCague were truly shocking. His fear is that we may look back on this era in time to come with sadness of regret. The Government is moving in terms of online safety but we need to more and do it quicker because we need to protect young people in their formative years and I fear that social media gives young people an impression of the world that is far from reality.

I again thank the Senator for raising these important issues. I assure him that online safety is a priority for the Government. Legislation and regulation are a vital part of minimising the availability of harmful and illegal content, especially for children. However, we need to ensure that those laws are effective, capable of being supervised and enforced in practice, and do not go beyond what is proportionate.

The Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport, Deputy O’ Donovan, has made it a priority theme for the upcoming EU Presidency to work with our EU partners to ensure that our regulation remains robust and up to date and that children are safe in the online world. This is something that is not specific to this country. If we can work with other member states, we should do so because online safety is an issue that crosses boundaries. The Senator has outlined the impact that social media can have and highlighted the exceptional presentation given by the principal of St. Macartan's College. That speaks to how important online safety is kept to the forefront of our minds. Online safety is a big issue of this generation. It is important that online safety is discussed and teased out in detail, to which the Senator has contributed today. Departmental officials, the Minister and I will work to do everything that we can to address the harmful impacts of social media on young people, in particular.

I thank the Minister of State and the Senator.