I have no doubt the Government's age verification system proposals are well-intentioned but we in the Social Democrats have major concerns over this. It is not working in the jurisdictions where it is currently running, it raises major privacy and security concerns, it interferes with the rights of children and young people to engage in online life and participation in society more broadly and it leaves behind the root cause of the issues that exist in the online space. Why is the Government pursuing this when we know its efforts would be better spent on dealing with toxic algorithms and legislating for platforms as publishers? One of the Taoiseach's colleagues, Deputy Malcolm Byrne, agreed with me this morning on radio that this is a problematic initiative and he really failed to give his support to what seems to be Government policy now.

This is a reasoned contribution. Earlier the Taoiseach said we are too quick to rush to criticism but that is not the case. I appreciate it is well-intentioned and that there is a place for classification but this is not going to work. We need better solutions.

First of all, the age verification tool is currently being piloted, or the intention by the Department is to pilot it.

But it is distracting from what we need.

Robust age verification is part of the infrastructure we need to build to protect our children online. Our counterparts in Europe are of the same view on how to achieve this and we will work together to ensure the online realm is safe for children. Piloting, by the way, is about evaluation, asking whether it works and whether it has other implications. The intention is that it would be privacy-preserving and would protect people's rights but we will explore all that too. The other side of the coin is we need to enable children through programmes in our education system to be more resilient in terms of what they face in the modern era.

We need to fix the online space.

Deputy please, that is not how this session works.

I call Deputy Stanley.