The topic for consideration is a discussion on technology, social media and children, with a particular focus on the safety and well-being of children online. I welcome from SpunOut, Ms Sinéad Keane, CEO, and Dr. Tara Logan Buckley, director of clinical support; from Foróige, Ms Miriam Ryan, director of targeted services and safeguarding, and Mr. Anthony O’Connor, senior youth officer, GoSafely online safety team; from the National Youth Council of Ireland, Ms Siobhán Laffey, national child protection programme manager, and Ms Kathryn Walsh, director of policy and advocacy; from the Children's Rights Alliance, Ms Noeline Blackwell, online safety co-ordinator, and Ms Alex Murphy, online safety legal officer; and from CyberSafeKids, Ms Alex Cooney, CEO.

Before we begin, I have a few housekeeping matters to go through. I do not think we have anybody on MS Teams so I will move on.

In advance of inviting our witnesses to deliver their opening statements, I advise them and members that they are protected by absolute privilege in respect of their presentations to the committee. This means they have an absolute defence against any defamation action relating to anything they say at the meeting. However, they are expected not to abuse this privilege, and it is my duty as Cathaoirleach to ensure it is not abused. Therefore, if witnesses' statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

Each speaker will be allocated three minutes to deliver an opening statement. We have clocks on the walls to give the witnesses a sense of time. The opening statements will be followed by a question-and-answer session with members. I will call the witnesses in the following order: Dr. Tara Logan Buckley, Ms Miriam Ryan, Ms Siobhán Laffey, Ms Noeline Blackwell and Ms Alex Cooney.

I invite the witnesses to deliver their opening statements, starting with Dr. Logan Buckley.

I thank the Chairperson, Deputies and Senators for inviting us to contribute today. I am the director of clinical support at SpunOut, Ireland’s youth information and support platform.

For 20 years, SpunOut has worked to build evidence-based and person-centred digital solutions and safe supports for young people over 16 years of age. We do this through our wide and varied range of services, each of them a testament to the power and potential of technology to foster positive connections. At SpunOut, we meet young people where they are at 365 days a year and connect with over 1.4 million young people a year with high-quality youth information, a 24-7 messaging support service, elearning courses and online tools connecting young people to personalised mental health information, resources and support. So far this year, we have facilitated over 50,000 conversations through Text About It, our messaging platform, providing support from a calming chat to crisis intervention. This digital service delivers early intervention that prevents escalation, easing pressure on overstretched emergency departments, the child and adolescent mental health services or CAMHS, and adult mental health services.

In 2025 alone, young people have visited our website 1.1 million times, accessing youth information, with the most popular topics being managing mental health, learning about neurodiversity and eating disorders. This information, which is both youth-proofed and validated by experts, provides high-quality, trusted information in an era of fake news and clickbait.

This year, our new Navigator service has also facilitated more than 28,000 young people to access personalised resources and signposting to mental health supports. Having supported young people for over two decades, we know how digital connection, when done correctly, can provide support and hope when everything else feels out of reach.

One of SpunOut’s core values is innovation. We will always champion the free availability of information and technology where it stands to help, support and inform young people.

I will speak today about online safety and technology. We feel it is imperative to consider the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in the digital environment, and the right to participate, but also to be protected from harm. In recent months, we have seen an increase in the number of young people contacting our Text About It service seeking support relating to AI-generated content and image-based sexual abuse. We welcome the steps taken by Ireland in recent years, including legislation, the appointment of a regulator and the development of a youth advisory panel, but there is more to do to create a safe and well-regulated online environment. We believe the following steps must be taken: protect young people from illegal and harmful content as defined in the 2022 Online Safety and Media Regulation Act; ensure that there is a clear legal obligation to prevent the dissemination of content that is harmful to children and young people under 18; protect young people from recommender algorithm systems used in content feeds; update the AI Act to address risks posed to young people, including interactions with generative AI chatbots; and educate young people about digital literacy, including privacy, self-representation, digital well-being and the different types of information online.

At SpunOut, we believe in the participation of young people in a digital world. We need to balance this right to participate in the online world with protection from the harms they are facing online. As a youth organisation, we urge the committee to work with young people and give them a real voice in shaping what a safe, well-regulated online environment looks like.

On behalf of Foróige, I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak today. Safeguarding and the well-being of young people is paramount for Foróige. Our safeguarding ethos extends from in-person engagement to online spaces, where young people spend a significant amount of time. This environment can expose them to complex risks, such as inappropriate content, cyberbullying, unhealthy screen time, misinformation and disinformation. Furthermore, AI and biased algorithms may magnify these risks on a large scale.

Foróige has engaged in digital youth work for over 20 years, with successful collaborations nationally and internationally. We actively promote the benefits of digital, universal and targeted youth work, guided by the belief that young people should be empowered to be creators rather than consumers of technology. An important premise of youth work is meeting young people where they are at and as such, digital programmes are vital for reaching young people. This is achieved through initiatives like podcasting, video production, robotics and virtual reality youth spaces.

Foróige has established a network of digital hubs in existing youth spaces across the country, and the work we do here helps young people develop essential skills such as empathy, critical thinking and digital citizenship, enriching their development, enhancing their digital literacy and supporting their well-being. It is important to recognise that the lived experience of young people when it comes to technology and social media is both positive and negative. They feel more connected than ever before and find incredible opportunities to learn and grow. However, they also voice significant fears, including AI, deepfaking, scams, misinformation and disinformation, privacy issues and the values imposed by social media personalities.

Parents and guardians often express their own fears and struggle to keep pace with technology. Research highlights a significant communication gap, with many parents unaware of their online consumption. Foróige recognises these concerns, from exposure to inappropriate content on social media platforms to risks of online exploitation and pressures from unhealthy advertising, all compounded by the risks of AI.

Youth workers and volunteers are ideally placed to have these crucial first conversations and serve as the immediate support system when a young person discloses a negative online experience. Commissioned by the Department of Education and Youth, Foróige has developed the Connect Safely programme for ages 8 to 11 and 12 to 18 years. Its aim is to promote the safer use of digital resources, equipping young people with skills to safely benefit from being online and empowering them as positive digital citizens. Connect Safely also provides resources for parents and guardians. We stress that technology will always change but the fundamentals of child protection will not.

The era of self-regulation is over. The pressure on young people and parents to have all the answers is too great. A holistic approach involving social media companies, government, parents, guardians, schools and youth work is urgently needed, which was echoed in a recent ESRI report. This collaboration is vital for establishing consistent standards and a unified framework of support across the sector.

All young people must have the opportunity to learn safety skills, access support from trusted adults and benefit from programmes like Connect Safely. Foróige recommends investment in digital, targeted and universal youth work. This investment is crucial to mitigate online risks, inform best practice and foster the benefits of technology for young people. I thank the committee for its time and consideration.

On behalf of the National Youth Council of Ireland, I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak today on the critical issue of the safety and well-being of children online. The National Youth Council of Ireland is the representative body for voluntary youth organisations in Ireland, and our national child protection programme supports the sector to fulfil their safeguarding responsibilities under Children First. I am joined today by my colleague, Kathryn Walsh, director of policy and advocacy.

Children and young people are rights holders in the digital world. They deserve an online environment that protects their privacy, safety and well-being. However, the pace of technological change has introduced serious risks that are accelerating rapidly. These include online sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual extortion and the proliferation of child sexual abuse material, known as CSAM, including a dramatic rise in self-generated CSAM, often produced under coercion, and the growing use of AI and deepfake technology to create CSAM and automate grooming. We also see harmful recommender systems amplifying extreme content, widespread mis- and disinformation and online spaces that foster hate speech, racism and discrimination. These dangers have profound impacts on young people’s mental health, well-being and sense of safety, and more information on these can be found in our briefing document.

While regulation is essential, it cannot stand alone. We believe youth work plays a unique and irreplaceable role in addressing these challenges. Youth workers provide safe offline spaces where trust and respect are central, spaces that enable young people to disclose harm, seek support and build resilience. They deliver education that empowers young people to navigate digital spaces critically and confidently, and they respond when harm occurs. For many young people who are disengaged from formal education, youth work may be their only source of accurate information and support regarding digital literacy and online safety.

This relational approach is vital. Research shows that children and young people are more likely to speak up about harm when they have trusted adults who understand the online world and can respond appropriately. Youth workers and volunteers are those trusted adults for many young people, but they need resources and training to keep pace with the emerging risks mentioned above.

Our accompanying briefing document provides detailed information on these risks and dangers, as well as clear recommendations for action. These include increasing resources and capacity within youth work organisations, including youth information services, to empower young people; recognising and resourcing education and training for youth workers to build their capacity to recognise and respond to emerging online harms; embedding safety by design and by default in digital platforms, including turning off recommender systems by default; and ensuring ongoing consultation with children and young people so their voices shape policy.

A safer, more inclusive Internet begins with education, dialogue and community, and youth work is central to this effort. Youth workers and volunteers provide trusted relationships and safe offline spaces where young people can learn, share and seek support. By equipping youth workers with the training and resources they need, we empower them to help young people defend their rights and build the confidence to thrive in a digital world. Protecting children and young people online is a shared responsibility that demands urgent, co-ordinated action across policy, platforms and practice.

I thank the committee for the invitation to the Children’s Rights Alliance today. I am here with my colleague, Alex Murphy. This opening statement highlights some of the points made in a briefing document circulated to committee members earlier.

Children in Ireland are growing up in a digital environment that profoundly shapes their learning, participation, identity formation and daily lives. Social media and digital technologies offer significant opportunities for communication, creativity, inclusion and self-expression. However, the systems that underpin these technologies were largely designed by adults without thought to children’s rights or developmental needs. As a result, children face a wide range of potential risks, ranging from harmful content and manipulative recommender systems to privacy violations, discrimination and sexual exploitation. Ensuring a safe digital world is not simply a policy preference. As colleagues have said, it is a matter of human rights, something affirmed by the widely ratified UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNCRC, and analysed for the digital age in one of its comments, general comment No. 25.

Ireland’s legislative and regulatory landscape has evolved rapidly in recent years, largely driven by EU law. These create an accountability structure obliging platforms to protect children from accessing harmful content and systems and to assess and mitigate risks to children. They are obliged to provide effective age assurance, restrict access to harmful or violent content and ensure safe design. This is overseen by the regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, particularly for platforms headquartered in Ireland, while the Data Protection Commissioner also has a part to play. However, all this regulation is very new, with much in place for less than six months and significant gaps remain. It remains to be seen how it will be implemented.

EU efforts to regulate child sexual abuse material have stalled or are so slow as to leave really weak deterrence against child exploitation and insufficient platform obligations to detect, prevent and remove CSAM. Key regulatory innovation, such as the binding individual complaints mechanism required by the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022, has yet to be put in place. Age assurance measures remain inconsistent and, many times, inadequate. This month, we heard about developments of age assurance tools in Ireland in the form of a digital wallet, but they are not there yet and there needs to be alternatives to government-provided tools as well.

The rise of artificial intelligence intensifies existing harms. Behavioural recommender systems and AI-driven engagement tools can manipulate attention, drive excessive screen time and expose children and young people to harmful content. Emerging AI companions raise particular concerns, as others have said. AI systems also pose heightened risks to children’s privacy and exacerbate discrimination through biased datasets and algorithmic decision-making. Although the EU AI Act acknowledges child vulnerability, it stops short of classifying AI companions, deepfakes or nudifying apps as high-risk technologies, despite clear behavioural and psychological implications.

Robust digital literacy and inclusion are essential components of regulation. While platforms must bear primary responsibility for safety by design, children, parents, educators and youth workers require accessible, trustworthy training and resources to navigate the digital world.

While there are some brilliant resources, we lack overall coherence of resources, with inconsistent quality, insufficient standardisation and no centralised repository of vetted guidance. A national, authoritative resource bank would help here.

Ultimately, Ireland can shape a digital environment where children and young people can participate, learn and thrive without exposure to preventable harm. Realising this requires rights-based regulation, accelerated action on child sexual abuse material, strengthened enforcement powers, improved age assurance, safety by design and a national strategy for digital literacy.

Ensuring that technology serves children rather than shaping or exploiting them is a prerequisite for a safe, inclusive and equitable digital future.

I thank the Chair and members of the committee for this invitation. I am the CEO and co-founder of CyberSafeKids.

CyberSafeKids is an Irish charity committed to creating a safer digital world for children, drawing on a decade of research into children's online lives. In that time, we have engaged nearly 100,000 children and thousands of parents, educators, youth workers, law enforcement officers, policymakers and industry stakeholders.

I will frame my remarks within the context of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly general comment No. 25 on children's rights in the digital environment - the rights to participation, protection from harm, freedom from commercial exploitation and access to accurate information. Children are frequently failed when it comes to these rights every time they go online and we have yet to find a solution that upholds all of these rights simultaneously. They continue to face content, contact, conduct and contract risks, which I can expand on in questions.

There is no silver bullet solution. We need societal level action - greater support for parents and carers so they can more effectively mediate their children's use and access, critical digital literacy embedded across the curriculum, and effective regulation and enforcement.

Every country is grappling with how best to protect children online, sometimes reaching different conclusions. Australia’s recent amendment to its Online Safety Act, which introduced a minimum age of 16 for certain social media platforms, is ambitious but raises questions about the approach it has taken. For example, young people may be barred from YouTube's app but still access it through a browser, and the measure excludes gaming platforms, AI chatbots and, crucially, does not require any reform in these online environments. If we want children to thrive online, not just be restricted, we need fundamental design changes.

At the national level, we have put in place the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022, establishing Coimisiún na Meán and Ireland’s online safety framework. The first online safety code imposes binding obligations on major video-sharing platforms headquartered here. At European level, the Digital Services Act, DSA, particularly Article 28, is central. It focuses on protecting minors through a risk management approach. Ireland has a key supervisory role because many of the very large online platforms are based here.

As Ms Blackwell has already said, we are still at the early stages of enforcing these rules, and it will take time to gauge their impact. However, we are concerned current measures are neither strong nor specific enough to ensure age-appropriate online spaces that are safe by design and that uphold children's rights by design. I can expand further on these points in questions, if need be.

Our recommendations are: support digital literacy in schools through a comprehensive, curriculum-based approach; empower parents with accessible digital literacy programmes and awareness campaigns offering clear, supportive guidance; get regulation right, both nationally and at the European level by using the DSA's risk management framework but applying it to all online environments children can access; by focusing on risk versus age rather than blanket age bans with assessments conducted independently by experts and grounded in children's rights and best interests; by addressing high-risk features such as harmful recommender systems, loot boxes, AI chatbots and exposure to bad actors; and by replacing self-assessment under Article 28 of the DSA, where companies rate their own risk, with an independent classification system that recommends appropriate minimum ages enforced through trusted, privacy preserving age verification; amend the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022 to mandate age verification requirements for online environments not based in the State, as Italy has recently done for adult content sites; and ban nudify-pornify tools, following the lead of the UK and Australia, which are moving to prohibit AI tools that generate or manipulate sexualised images of minors. We urge the committee to consider similar legislation for Ireland and also to consider following Denmark's example in copyrighting one's body and facial features and full voice to clamp down on the creation and dissemination of deepfakes. I thank the committee for listening to this presentation.

I thank you all for those enlightening opening statements and for being with us this morning. This is an important matter to all of the members of the committee. It is the second topic on our work programme. I am looking forward to a robust engagement this morning with you all.

It is proposed to publish the opening statements to the Oireachtas website. Is that agreed? Agreed.

I apologise that I will have to leave after this. I am on duty in the Seanad. I am not walking out on the groups. I thank them all for coming in here today and giving up their valuable time, and I thank them for their opening statements, which were very well done. I especially thank them all for the brilliant work they do.

It is not easy being young these days and it is not easy being a parent of a young person these days. Online has many advantages - it opens up the world - but it has so many disadvantages as well. I hope we will get through some of them today.

I will start with Ms Cooney. She emphasises empowering parents with digital literacy. What supports or campaigns have proven most effective from international research and could Ireland adopt these?

I will start by saying there was some really interesting research in Ireland early this year by Block W and the ESRI which was looking at parenting in the digital age. It considered 4,000 different pieces of research. It found that many parents are also struggling to mediate their own use, which obviously makes it harder to mediate their children's use. Another conclusion was that parents cannot do this on their own. Even if you are the best digital parent, you still need these online spaces to be made safer by design for children.

In relation to effective campaigns, the New Zealand Government led a really effective campaign called Keep It Real Online. It had a whole campaign page. They put out a series of short videos such as one-minute videos and a lot of support resources. This campaign effectively went viral. It was led by the government but it was a multi-stakeholder approach, including the New Zealand police. It is called Keep It Real Online. That is one we have often cited as being simple, effective messaging.

There have been others. Common Sense Media has led some brilliant campaigns for parents as well, such as Device Free Dinner, using well-known personalities and recognisable faces to land important messages about boundaries, for example, in the households.

There are some really good examples. I would even say the Data Protection Commission's recent what was called sharenting campaign was another excellent example and I believe it has done really well in pointing out the dangers of sharing too much information about your children online. There are some really good examples and it would be fantastic to see the Government leading out on some of these.

I thank Ms Cooney. The Children's Rights Alliance proposes a national resource bank for digital literacy. Will Ms Blackwell or Ms Murphy expand on that? What would it look like and how can we ensure it reaches those who would need it most?

What we are seeing is that people are often overwhelmed with the amount of information that is out there, where do they get the information that is suitable for them and where does it suit, and it is not licensed. There are no minimum quality standards. Some of it is absolutely brilliant; some of it is not. Coimisiún na Meán, which is already tasked and mandated to produce resources, could be the source of it, but it is a case of bringing together all the various resources that are there.

If you are dealing with a minority community, you need a different approach, through community, in order to talk to that community. This is about using someone like Webwise, or as near to it as you might get, allied to the Department of Education in some way, looking at schools' information.

It is about building up a way in which people can go somewhere that has a lot of options in the same place and where they can be guided to reliable, up-to-date information that is suitable for them, rather than being made nervous wrecks by being told so many different things that they have to do. It is a piece of work that is really only collating what is there already in many ways, building on that, categorising it and making it widely available to people.

Foróige's research shows a significant communication gap between parents and children online. Do Ms Ryan and Mr. O'Connor think schools and community organisations can play a part in bridging this gap?

Just to clarify, it was not our research, it was actually research by CyberSafeKids. We see schools and youth workers playing a role in that, particularly the role of the youth worker having in-person conversations and those in-person relationships to prepare young people for their journey online. For example, there is the connect safely programme for eight- to 11-year-old children. As we know, the digital age of consent is 16, so why do we have a programme for eight- to 11-year-olds? It is for that early intervention piece and preparing people for that online journey of being a digital citizen. Youth workers and schools alike are well placed to have those kind of in-person conversations to help young people in the online experience and building those digital literacy skills.

Youth workers obviously need to be trained the whole time and keep on top of things and budgets are fairly limited. How, with limited resources, can training continue to be of a high standard for the workers?

We offer safeguarding training to all youth workers. Youth work organisations complete our four-hour training programme. That must cover all the risks that come under safeguarding and child protection. We are limited in the focus we can give to online safety. We need funding so we have a dedicated resource that can stay up to date on all the emerging risks, that can collate the information that is out there and make it specific to youth services, youth workers and the types of young people we are engaging with. NYCI then plays that role in facilitating that support to the rest of the sector, to our members and to our non-members to make sure they can avail of that training so they do not have the burden of trying to collate and understand all of this information.

Ms Blackwell was talking about that resource bank for digital literacy. When we are developing resources we see a lot of websites and information that is very specific to schools and the curriculum but we need to make sure the resources developed are also available and relevant to youth services. Youth work is a non-formal educational practice and now that we are back at the Department of Education and Youth, it is important there is a synergy between formal and informal. Youth work engages with young people where they are. We have heard it right across different Oireachtas committees of late. Youth workers and volunteers are engaging with young people across a myriad of issues. They are not experts in mental health and they are not experts in well-being, but they are engaging young people where there are needs. We do need to make sure youth services are sufficiently funded to be able to do this and that the resources are there, coming from the Department of Education and Youth and others. For example, we know the AI committee only yesterday recommended funding for youth work to address these issues in those settings.

I thank all the witnesses for coming in and for their comprehensive statements. As a mum to eight-year-old twins, this is an area I am very focussed on and terrified of. I am also very conscious that, as politicians, our phones are never out of our hands. We are non-stop on our phones and are probably setting the worst examples for our children. I also want to make sure we are not blaming parents either. We must be careful we are not judging parents. Certainly we, as politicians, should not be coming out and judging parents. We can look at Australia and the age ban. Some of the witnesses have referenced it. Does that work? Would something like that work here or do we actually have to tackle the problem at source - the technology, the recommender apps, the design by safety?

Everyone in the room has views on it. It is an experiment by Australia to censor children from access to certain random social media sites with a view to saving them from the harms of those sites. In Ireland our regulation is not all that different but it takes a slightly different approach. As it stands, and as Mr. O'Connor said, we have a digital age of consent of 16 years, whereby children under 16 years of age who sign up to a social media account require parental consent in most cases. We do not know who the child is in lots of cases so that is more in the breach than in the adoption. That is the case in Ireland where we have an under-16 policy, but we also have a policy that says children may, when they reach the right age, start learning.

We put the focus more on the tech companies. We say that under the online safety code and under the Digital Services Act they are obliged to keep children away from the type of content Australia also wants to protect them from. The big difference in broad terms is that Australia says under-16s are totally out of the picture. Most child rights advocates, including those in Australia, would say that is not the best approach. They would say the better approach is to allow children, as they evolve over time, to have access to appropriate safe content. That is up to the tech companies. Initially, we thought that children or parents would be penalised but, no, it is the tech companies now. That is what we do as well. In Ireland most of the tech companies could now be penalised for allowing children to access unsafe material. As Ms Cooney said, our implementation is very new. The regulator takes time to gear up and key to this would be effective age assurance, which we do not have.

Does the regulator have the resources to penalise providers if and when it is necessary?

Our understanding is that at the moment it is still building its resources and it is not short of money. We are looking to see what its energy level is like for this. Coimisiún na Meán has already started two investigations against social media companies on its own and it has joined in with four against porn companies in the EU Commission. It is just that regulation is slow. In some ways our challenge to the national Legislature is that there are gaps. It seems to us that the national Legislature can go further. For instance, there is developing effective age assurance mechanisms, both Government and private. In terms of ensuring children are not exposed to child sexual abuse material, this Legislature has a duty as well. The regulator, it seems to us, has the energy and the interest in protecting minors' rights, but it is less than six months old and regulation just does not speed along.

As a lawyer, I am conscious that it is very difficult for legislation to keep up with technology developments.

We are trying to focus not on the tech bits of it. In terms of artificial intelligence and generative AI, we are saying the harms are worse with it than they were before, but the sources of harm are the same. The same things have to happen. The companies that produce this must to assess the risk. They must say they will deny children access to inappropriate material because if we are trying to do a tech-by-tech instrument, it will not work all that well. That is why regulation is not a bad way to start. However, there are places where it simply is not happening at all. That is where the national Legislature does not even know where that gaps are and it needs to up its game. There is an audit happening at the Department of justice on what child sexual abuse material is online and offline and asking if something that is illegal offline is legal online. There are a lot of ways people can help. There needs to be adequate scrutiny of the regulator. The regulator needs to be in very regularly to check it is doing as much as it can in respect of children.

Also, to be pushing the regulator. What is Ms Blackwell's sense of the engagement with tech companies? How resistant are they to the regulation?

It depends on the tech companies. If it is X, it is suing Coimisiún na Meán on at least two fronts saying that it is over-reaching in the online safety code. Most of them will say they are happy to comply with regulation. That is where the regulator is so important because the companies' job is to make money while the regulator's job is to make sure they only make it safely.

I will quickly move to Foróige, which does amazing work out in Balbriggan, Skerries and Rush. I really appreciate all the work. I was at the summer festival there recently and was unbelievably impressed by the presentations by people who had been through some of Foróige's mentorship programmes. It is a real testament to the work it does but I am conscious that some of the children are in different youth programmes with a varying level of parental interaction. That is right across the socioeconomic bounds; it is not just in more deprived areas. How can we make sure that parents are playing their part?

I will allow a brief response.

Apologies, I will not be able to come back because I have to move to the Committee of Public Accounts.

I will give Ms Ryan a minute to respond.

I thank the Deputy for those kind comments. To follow on from some of Ms Blackwell's points in relation to what youth work can do to ensure young people have the skills to navigate that space, there are parents who will be involved and others who will not. There is a need to recognise, too, that there is space within the youth work setting to allow young people to develop critical thinking and problem solving and to understand the difference between good and bad actors online. That takes time but good facilitation skills among youth workers will enable those discussions to happen. We have a network of digital hubs and spaces across the country in all youth work organisations where young people can come and learn about technology and that it is not always about digital online platforms but how you can create spaces for that whole science, technology, engineering, art and maths, STEAM, to enable them to problem-solve and get further in their lives.

I thank the witnesses for coming in here this morning and sharing their expertise and knowledge with us. My first question is for all of the witnesses. I apologise, Chair. In here, we talk about topics like disability needing to have cross-departmental committees. Everyone has to be engaged in the conversation to fix and solve the issues we have in, say, the area of disability. Is there a committee of experts like the witnesses or a subcommittee that is working together on this really important topic? I know the witnesses all have their focuses but this is one that must concern every youth group. Is there a subcommittee or could there be a subcommittee formed that could engage on a national level? I am not sure who wants to take that question.

When we were outside, it was so lovely to even meet colleagues at a very busy time of the year. Outside, one of the things we said is that we are the Children's Rights Alliance. Something we should really be able to do is build up a better understanding between people. It affects every area of children's lives so the Deputy is 100% right. It is not a specific issue for tech or under-18s. We will be looking in the spring at trying to map who is working in the space and bringing that coalition together in some way. We may have to go with our begging bowl a little bit but we should have that capacity. All our members - I think everyone here is a member - are doing amazing work in different areas so we will try to pull it together a little bit.

Going back to the conversation on the digital ID, are any of the witnesses engaged in those conversations at a national level at the moment? That is probably something we all agree needs a lot of work and could be highly valuable but are the witnesses being engaged with on it? It is probably a question for Ms Blackwell again.

Ms Cooney might have something to say on it as well. We are not talking directly to the OGCIO. I am not sure I remember what the acronym is, let alone the name of the committee. We are not talking to it directly but we understand it is working on it. We are having some conversations with the European Commission as well, which is quite well advanced on its own age assurance tool. It tends to base it on a national identity card, which means, in some ways, it has a basis. We have to work out a different basis. We have not been doing so.

The other thing we are clear about as well is that it cannot only be a Government tool. Some people will not tell the Government any more than they absolutely have to and that is their right. There will have to be verified, licensed third-party providers as well that both the Data Protection Commission and Coimisiún na Meán believe are satisfactorily privacy-assuring for people to show their age. It is going to be great when it is out because hopefully all you will have to do when you go onto an app is say you are over 13, 15 or 18. That is all they will have to know.

It is good to see these discussions and evolutions progressing. I would agree with Ms Blackwell that we also need trusted third parties. Ideally, we need to ensure these processes are not held by the tech companies themselves. My understanding is that they will have a choice to use the national wallet or use their own solutions, as long as they are using effective age assurance but we have to be careful because this obviously allows them more of our data. There is not a high level of trust in regard to what they are using our data for, so it needs to be independent of those tech companies.

The other thing we have to consider is how compulsory this will be. If we do not have minimum age established in law, then how do we apply it other than in a voluntary way? Other countries around Europe are also looking at this and ways they can implement it, even for blocking access to adult content, for example. None of the providers of such content are based in Ireland, unless you include X, which allows that kind of content, so how do we apply these solutions to non-State-based entities? How do we ensure children in Ireland are protected from accessing this content? It is also not just the very large. There are four providers of such content on the very large list but there are a multitude of other sites and they are increasing by the day - the My AI Girlfriend types and the nudifying tools. These are all fully accessible to children so we need to look at ways, including geoblocking, if entities do not comply with our rules, to ensure children are going to be protected. The UK has obviously gone its own way on this. It is not part of Europe. It is not just about introducing those solutions; it is how we are going to put those solutions in place effectively and make sure they are not optional.

I thank Ms Cooney. I will stick with her if she does not mind. Her third point was around getting the regulation right, which we all agree is very important. On the topic of the focus on risk versus age rather than blanket age bans, we are probably all sitting here saying that because the Internet and social media is so vast, the more blanket regulation we can bring in the better. When Ms Cooney refers to risk versus age, can she give me an example of that or expand on how that actually works? How could we do that?

I am using the language of the European Digital Services Act. It talks about case-by-case risk management proportionate to size. That is why there is this focus on the very large. Using that language of risk, at the moment in the Article 28 guidelines - which focus on the protection of minors - companies are allowed to assess their own level of risk and whether it is high, medium or low. High-risk would be 18-plus - the adult content providers - and then there are medium and low. It is not so clear what constitutes medium and low. There is also a real risk in allowing these companies to self-assess. Again, I would bring it back to trust. Do we trust that they will make those judgments in the best interests of children instead of commercial gain? To my mind, that process should be an independent analysis where you have a classification framework that is drawn up independently and looks at risk, for example, AI chatbots. If you look at something like WhatsApp - which, by the way, is not even on the very large online platform list, even though it meets the size threshold because it is considered a private communications platform - it is highly accessible to children. We know that 29% of under-13s in Ireland have an account on WhatsApp.

It has an AI chatbot that Common Sense Media classifies as unacceptably high risk. It has lock chat features and disappearing messages. It is seemingly exempt from these child protection regulations. To my mind, those sorts of features make it high risk. Other high-risk features include the recommender system, the loop boxes. We need to ensure those are appropriately age-gated. I am sorry for going over time.

Committee members will come at me because I am usually strict on time, but I am so interested in this topic that I am tempted to keep talking.

Feel free to allow the conversation-----

We will have time for a second round. I am interested in every topic. I call Deputy Ó Murchú.

I was quite happy for the Chairperson to continue, as I think everyone else was. I apologise, I was in the Dáil Chamber when the witnesses made their opening statements. We all know the dangers online for children. We are in a messed-up world. It seems to be getting a little more messed up, whether that is geopolitically or domestically in what people call "the western world", whatever that means these days. We have all seen a considerable number of people for whom the online space is not great.

Representatives of the National Youth Council of Ireland, NCYI, were before another committee yesterday. A number of students attended the meeting. Sometimes such meetings can feel, for want of a better term, rather trite and a matter of going through the motions. Yesterday's witnesses, however, were quite brilliant. They spoke about computer and IT literacy. Theirs is a cohort that is obviously engaged, interested and all the rest. I asked how those witnesses developed their analyses or whatever else. They said they did it through youth work. Like anyone else, you go on the system and get what you hear. It is the equivalent of your uncle telling you something, in the days before Google, that you did not check for 20 years and that turned out to be untrue. You get some piece of information. You see it on Facebook. The recommender systems then ensure that is the only thing you hear and you are absolutely sure that you have the solution to all the world's problems, whatever they are. Those witnesses were questioned about that. I asked if a safe space was arrived at. I was told it was, to a degree, but in some cases, there was an element of push-back and playing devil's advocate. Within that, they were forced to question their own views, particularly in respect of information they had derived. I am not saying they would not have come to that place anyway, but it showed me how you could operate, particularly in a school setting, a level of resilience building and literacy and whatever else, and provide the weapons and tools that are needed by children these days.

I have no doubt but that we need to go up against big tech. I overuse this comparison, but I sometimes think it is like a five-a-side team going up against Barcelona. We are taking about Coimisiún na Meán and whatever the European Commission does. We are also talking about tech empires that have serious resources and, unfortunately, the backing of the US regime at this point. My view is that we have to properly get to grips with these issues through youth work and other projects. We must do it in schools to build up children's capacity to deal with these issues. The problem is not just kids. There is also a problem with adults. If we are aiming training programmes, they need to be aimed at kids.

At the same time, we must go at the dangers that the tech bros have provided us with. We must take on algorithms and recommender systems. With the huge support they have, it is going to be incredibly difficult. That does not mean we do not do it. The thing we can do more simply is to ensure we give the tools to kids. The witnesses may wish to comment rather than hear me pontificating.

I will come in first. I thank the Deputy. Representatives of the EU youth dialogue, Young Voices, were before the EU affairs committee yesterday. That was what the Deputy was speaking to. One of the important points they made, as was echoed by the Deputy, was that young people would not have been there and articulating those points had it not been for youth work. I commend them because they were fantastic and articulate.

It was the greatest endorsement of youth work I have ever seen or heard. They were absolutely brilliant.

That is exactly right. The beauty of our work is that we can sit back and they can do this work themselves and articulate it. However, you need to give young people the support and scaffolding to come into these spaces. One of the big things we talk about in our submission to the committee is that when we talk about these issues that affect children and young people, we need to ensure we are meaningfully engaging with young people to get their perspectives and viewpoints on what they are seeing online. It is important to talk about the report of the online health task force that was published in the past week and the interim report published earlier in the year. The chair of that committee, Jillian van Turnhout, talked in her personal essay about the importance of safe offline spaces for young people when we are talking about online harm. That goes to the root of youth work and why it matters in the digital age. In this hyper-connected age when people are online, they are constantly navigating online spaces. They are online for work and socialising. Youth work offers a vital counterbalance. As the Deputy said, we need those safe offline spaces. When you see something online that challenges you, you can go to a trusted adult, a volunteer or youth worker, to bring it up. You may not have parental support. You may not feel comfortable with teachers in formal education. That is why we talk about the importance of youth work. Not all young people are engaged with formal education or comfortable with schools. That is why literacy and support are important in youth work.

Multiple settings, whatever they are, are needed.

That is exactly right. Ms van Turnhout says that we need to ensure there are more safe online spaces for young people to have this engagement, whether through youth work, the arts or musical theatre. All those spaces are vital. She talks about the need for cross-governmental support.

The Deputy mentioned that it is not just young people who are having these challenges online. We will publish a report next year about the impact of misinformation and disinformation on young people in Ireland. One of the findings is that family is a vector for misinformation and disinformation. Young people often encounter misinformation and disinformation from parents and relatives. That is harder to navigate. We must also talk about those kitchen table conversations. I am not saying it is only children and young people who encounter these issues and feel the harm. It is about the wider societal impact. I mention that.

It is great to see the importance of youth work and the role it plays being brought up at all these forums in the Oireachtas. However, I would not be doing my advocacy role if I did not say that the sector needs to be funded. We cannot do all this work without the funding. Volunteers, youth workers and these spaces need to be funded to be in places where young people are.

I will follow up on Ms Walsh's point. We need to recognise that schools are absolutely critical, as are youth work spaces. We must also recognise that there is a population of young people who are socially isolated and struggle with their mental health. Perhaps they find it difficult to communicate in ordinary spaces where the majority of young people engage. We know and have seen that, consequently, many young people spend a lot of their time in the online space and find that they can connect there. We need to engage, and have been engaging, with those young people in the spaces where they do connect and find their tribes. They learn to engage in spaces where people are familiar with the likes of Dungeons and Dragons and use technology to connect with others who are in the same space. As such, they learn to come away from that with the skills they need to navigate some of the struggles they meet on a regular basis.

I did a runner from my other seat because I felt weird sitting behind everyone. I thank the witnesses for their time. To have such collective expertise in this area is a privilege for us and we can just listen.

I am very biased. I have been a youth worker for nearly 20 years. I am coming here very biased. Being a youth worker is the best job in the world. I try to say that at every opportunity. I think Ms Walsh hit it perfectly. We might not be the experts on the topic but we are experts on the process with regard to informal education and a youth worker approach to an issue such as this. My analysis tells me that what we are experiencing is just the latest moral panic around children and young people. Generationally, we always have something to be concerned about when it comes to children and young people. My concern from a policy perspective is that if all we have in our hands is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. In that context, we will have a black-and-white response. There will be a universal answer from a policy perspective that will ultimately impact children and young people's right to engage in what is often a beneficial and educational experience, even through there are legitimate child protection and safety concerns.

I have already taken up too much time on the microphone, so I want to open the floor to the witnesses. My world changed when Covid happened because I became an expert at Fortnite and FIFA, but I did some of my best youth work online. What are young people saying to the witnesses in their professional experience about the positives associated with being online and spending time online?

I can come in here. SpunOut is a digital service. All of our services and supports are offered online. We provide high-quality youth information that is verified by experts and then proofed by young people. We have more than 250 young people in our youth participation panel who come together, connect and help us shape our services. What they have told us about the online world is that it offers them a space for connection. They know when they are coming to a trusted service like ours that it provides a space where they can find information that is accurate and relevant to the Irish audience. It is bringing them information about topics that they just might not be able to learn about at school. For many young people from more rural areas or certain minorities, like LGBT people, it offers a space to connect online when they might not be out or connecting with other young people in their area at the time due to safety. There are many benefits to the online world too.

We run Text About It. For people who might not know, that is a 24-7, 365 days a year text support service, which is anonymised. We see this an awful lot, where we have young people disclose that they had no one else to talk to, that waiting lists were too long or that they are really embarrassed about something. It offers a space for young people. Because it is online, there is almost a barrier. For some people, being online can make them come and look for support much quicker than they would with traditional methods because it breaks that barrier down. We see many neurodiverse people who like to use the online space because they do not have to manage those social nuances. We see many texters who engage with that too. I think the online world can be really good for people with ADHD, with that dopamine hit and striving for it. It is also a place where people can connect with others with similar interests, which the Deputy was talking about too. We see really good online support too. We see this all the time, particularly in Text About It. We see the trends and the people who get support from us who would not get support in other areas. Coming up to the Christmas break, many services will be closed and many people will be going back to strained family dynamics that they will find really difficult. We have a service that they can reach out to, even though it is in the digital space.

On the experiences of young people online, we in Foróige have a virtual reality programme where we meet young people in safe virtual spaces. There was a great article in The Irish Times about Foróige's go virtual programme, where it collaborated with the Irish Wheelchair Association to create a virtual online youth space for young people who have disabilities, where coming to a physical youth space is not an option for them. They meet up every week in an alternate space every Thursday. It is a safe virtual space. It is staffed by two youth workers who link in with parents and guardians. They send out VR headsets to the houses and go through the set-up with them. Young people have the potential to create their own spaces in these virtual spaces. They are private spaces, so they are locked and there is no chance of stranger danger. They are facilitated by trained youth workers. Young people who are physically disabled can grow 10 ft tall or fly around in the virtual space. I have participated in these virtual sessions, where they can create these own rooms in these virtual spaces and learn to create and connect. They are not bound by any physical distances either, so young people do not have to worry about commuting for an hour to get to a youth space. They have access to youth workers and youth spaces too.

In the connect safely programme, we have a youth advocacy group spread out across the country. We have transitioned from Zoom into virtual spaces too, where young people get a chance to connect. It gets them to creatively think, too, about what the ideal safe space that they want is, so that when we put them in that virtual space, they can play paintball and have fun but also critically think about how they create spaces or what the ideal spaces that they want are.

We work with younger children because we start at age eight, in primary schools. We get feedback from them that they want to participate in the online world. They do not want that access taken away, but there are things they do not like about it. They talk a lot about rude content, for example, or scary, horror-type content that they do not want to see. What we have seen over the years is that very young children have access to pretty much any online space. We need more of the safe online spaces in which they can participate. Unless we force the creation of those online spaces, children will start to be excluded, like we have seen in Australia. We need to see these companies working much harder. Roblox is the most popular online environment for children under 13 in Ireland. If it wants children of age five or older, which is the minimum age, it needs to prove that it can be safe so that they can benefit from all that is great about Roblox but be protected from some of the bad actors and harmful content that they are exposed to. We need to find that balance and ensure that there are safe spaces in which children can participate.

Digital spaces that exist around the country are useful for allowing young people to come together with trained youth workers and to explore that online space is a safe environment where there is somebody who is overseeing, watching and observing where young people are. It is important that we are looking at that. I will cite a good model, in which Mayo County Council has taken a jump and looked at the old post office in Castlebar to repurpose it. It is a good facility in the middle of the town. It is creating a youth space and developing a digital space within it. It is not just what youth work can bring. There are many partners who can bring something to the table to enable us to provide better opportunity for young people.

I thank Deputy Farrelly. I have so many questions. It is great to have the witnesses here. I will go back to the online health task force report. Many things came up relating to sleep deprivation, attention and the fact that the brain is still developing. Somebody mentioned adults. Deputy Boland talked about politicians' roles and their phones. Truth be told, most adults in the country are probably fully addicted to their phones.

There is an issue relating to empowerment and education. When I visited a school recently, I got the sense that the eight- to 11-year-olds are already starting to demand a different online space than we experienced or those aged from 12 to 18 are experiencing. We got our smartphones at whatever age, we then found Bebo, MySpace and Facebook and then WhatsApp was brought in. We grew into it. That is where the teenagers who are in secondary school and college are now. When I went to school and talked to children in fifth and sixth class, they knew all of the dangers. They talked about all the positives, how they liked to create, game and connect. I felt they were overly afraid that kidnappers were going to get their information, come to their house and take them. They were maybe not so aware that taking information is potentially an issue too if someone knows who they are. They seemed to be really aware of the dangers and the things that they liked. They were telling me that they did not think they should have social media before 16 or smartphones before 14, but they wanted to be in the online space. Have the witnesses experienced that? SpunOut probably has that age cohort with its text service. CyberSafeKids is working with younger ones.

We work with children aged eight and older.

Maybe we might start with CyberSafeKids. Do the witnesses see differences in attitudes? We can bring in education, regulation and all the things that we need to do in a cross-government and cross-society approach, but I am thinking that these companies make their money from their customers. It strikes me that the customers coming up will demand a safer space. What are the witnesses' thoughts on that?

The Cathaoirleach is right. Certainly, with many primary-school aged children that we talk to, there are lots of things they do not like about it but they do not necessarily want it taken away either. Older kids that we talk to, maybe in secondary school, would tend to take a more restrictive approach about younger kids. They cannot believe their younger siblings have access to the likes of Snapchat because they know what goes on in those spaces. We need to find a way to allow children to be able to meaningfully participate in the online world at age- and stage-appropriate times. It is not appropriate for an eight- or nine-year-old to be on Snapchat, as Snapchat is now. We need to see reforms in these online environments. These companies need to earn the age ratings. Snapchat, YouTube, WhatsApp, TikTok and Instagram all have a minimum age of 13. That is their legally required minimum age that they are routinely ignoring. Because we survey children, we know that children under those minimum ages are absolutely using those spaces. They are not enforcing their own minimum age requirements. Even if we bring in a requirement that they must put in age assurance, we are really only requiring that they put in age assurance for the age they have set. It goes back to the risk they pose to children. We encourage these companies through regulation to earn the age ratings if they want that younger age. For example, something like Snapchat relies on the younger user base. If we were to say to Snapchat that outside of Australia, its age requirement must be 16+ unless it fundamentally changes its design, which is the real issue, we have to see that if it wants to keep those younger users, it needs to make serious reforms within the online environment to ensure it is going to be a safer and more positive experience for them.

The number of people using this tech service is phenomenal. Some 1.1 million people have accessed the website. Regarding the 5,000 conversations, are they 5,000 different people? How many users is that? Some might be repeated conversations. Is the conversation different in terms of the age profile?

We do not deal with primary school children. We deal with young people and Text About It is our service that anyone can go to. We have people in their 70s going to it. As for the numbers, we have had more than 50,000 conversations this year. Some of those are repeated texters. It is not a long-term therapeutic service; it is there to meet people in immediate moments of distress. What we have seen this year is more people coming to us looking for support around AI-generated content and cyberbullying. We are there to offer them that support in the here and now. My colleague, Dr. Logan Buckley, is the director of that service, so I will let her speak a little bit about it.

When our witnesses are speaking, it would be great if they could give us examples. I always find that real-life examples provide great context about AI-generated content. It is all anonymous but it gives a sense of what the teenagers are saying. For parents, that is so helpful to hear because they often miss that.

I will talk about some of the main things we see. One of the things we hear is that it is really overwhelming. The world, and particularly the online world, is overwhelming for them. As we know, teenagers have access to their phones. That is good because we are meeting them where they are at with that. They are saying that there is constant pinging of the phone. There are notifications. Many teenagers are driven by anxiety or shame. What is happening is that they need to keep clicking and checking the likes. They need to get the validation. When we think about teenagers from a developmental perspective, we understand that their prefrontal cortex is not fully mature yet. Their drive system - that reward system - matures more quickly than the emotional regulation system. It is almost like they become addicted to this behaviour, even though they do not want to. That is where we see the body reacting with a real physiological response. The threat system is activated when they are always on. They are really anxious. The Chair mentioned sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation can come in when this hyper-vigilance is a factor. We are hearing that teenagers are really overwhelmed and even though they want to put it down, they cannot.

One of the big things we are seeing is social comparison. That is where the shame comes in. The algorithms that are brought around suggest that people need to look at the perfect lifestyle or the perfect body. The AI images and videos that are being created really compound that. What we get from many texters is "I am simply not good enough; I am not attractive enough; no one will like me; anything I do is not good enough". Many of those self-critical places that we are seeing will come in during those adolescent and young adult years.

One of the big things we are seeing is definitely around AI imaging and deepfakes. That is a newer trend we are definitely seeing in the past 12 months. There are some really difficult cases. It is predominantly targeted towards females. Someone in their class may have taken a photo of them and created an image of them. The thing with that is that it is not like traditional bullying. Traditional bullying happened in the schoolyard and that was it. This is online, and it is constant. What we are seeing on top of that is the fear that it is searchable, everyone will see it and it will never go away. The outcome of that, clinically, is that it is presenting itself the exact same way as sexual trauma presents itself within young people.

The proposal to introduce secure pouches for phones in schools has received a lot of flak. We need to consider any mechanism schools can avail of to keep phones out of the classroom and out of the school for as much of the day as they can. We need everything. We have to throw everything at it. That is one of the things. Does Deputy Dempsey wish to come in?

I am not sure if I do, really, because I am filled with dread. Maybe I should not admit it, but Dr. Logan Buckley could have been describing me in some of the comments she made about how people feel about social media. When I post something, sometimes I can go down a rabbit hole in the evening by looking at the terrible things that have been commented underneath. It can stay with you for a day or even a week, depending on your mood or on different things. Eventually you put your adult hat on again and realise it is a small world, and those people are not really in your life, and all of those things. Maybe my prefrontal cortex needs a bit of work. The point is that this does not just affect teenagers and young people; it affects us as adults, politicians and parents.

Sometimes I find it hard to believe I am a parent and I have reached the age I am today. When I hear some of the words I use, sometimes I think it is my mother coming out in me. I think it cannot be me saying, "well just do not use it then; put it down". I said something along those lines at the Comhairle na nÓg Meath annual conference a couple of years ago when I was a councillor. The organisers invited councillors in to do exactly what we should be doing every day of the week, which is listening to young people and engaging with them. I heard at every table about their stress levels because of phones and social media. I walked around and talked to them all, and eventually I asked why they use social media. They looked at me like I had ten heads and said "this is our life". I did not grow up like that. It came later in my teen years. They cannot live without it and they are not going to. We cannot expect them to do so.

I am pretty much on a rant now. I am not sure where my question is going because Dr. Logan Buckley floored me with her comments. I never thought I would be the parent who did not know what Roblox was. I did not hear about it for six months after it was out there. I thought I was cool because I had Snapchat. I have nothing that came after that. I will try to know these things and understand them for my children. What more can we do for parents than we are doing now? We do not have hours a day to sit and do online training or whatever. What practical things can we do for parents? I refer to things that will make us more confident and help us to spot the warnings and the triggers. Are there any tips that our witnesses have?

When we talk to parents, we hear that one of the reasons they give children access, maybe before they think their children are ready, is social pressure. The kids are coming home saying everybody else has the phone or Snapchat, and they are the only one who does not. That has a huge influence. The fear that their child is going to be socially excluded outweighs any concern the parent has about the risk they might face. We need to reduce that social pressure. What we have seen over the past year, in particular, is an increase in hold-off movements around the country where groups of parents linked to schools - sometimes led by the school and sometimes led by the parents - come together and agree to hold off at least until the end of primary school, and then see where they are at. Sometimes it is about having a phone, and sometimes it is broader than that. My son went into first year this year. I was part of one of these groups. We agreed to hold off on Snapchat as well, for example. When my daughter went in a few years ago, every child had Snapchat. This way of coming together to be able to say "I know you are not going to be the only child" can be really effective.

We are actually seeing it in our data. We are seeing a drop-off in children under the age of 13 getting a smartphone. We are seeing a drop-off in children accessing social media. It is still a majority of children under 13 who have social media but there is a drop-off and I think this move is working. It is a social norm, essentially. One last thing I will say is that we have seen a very singular focus on smartphones, specifically. An eight- to 12-year-old is more likely to have a tablet or a games console. Any smart device in a bedroom overnight is risky. It is risky to have a young child with those devices in the bedroom. We need to do a lot more on educating and healthy boundaries in the household as well.

This just follows on from that. Last week, I hosted a parents and guardians online support webinar. It is coming on the back of those comments that were made from the registrations and that too. We say the aim is to close the gap in communication between parents, guardians and young people. Sometimes, I feel we have a lot of resources for parents and guardians and we have a lot of resources for young people but we do not bridge that gap of resources for both. In the Connect Safely programme, we talk about having open conversations with young people and regular check-ins too. It is very easy to go down the road of getting bogged down by the apps and thinking about what is trendy now. Snapchat was trendy two years ago and now TikTok is popular too. We always say that the fundamentals of child protection will not change whereas the apps will and the popularity and trends will too.

Sometimes, gaming does not get enough notice. As Ms Cooney was saying, we think about who the children are talking to on Snapchat but not about who are they talking to on their gaming chat forum. It is about signposting these things to parents about open conversations and regular check-ins. If parents ask their young children what game are they playing at the moment, who are they talking to on it, what the aim of the game is and what the age rating is - it should come from a place of love and good intentions, rather than just being nosy - that will help to close the gap in communications.

On the point about eight- to 11-year-olds in school, it could also be a result of people talking about it more at home. Their parents are talking about it a bit more. They are hearing it is not all good. Ms Cooney is right. There seems to be more understanding, particularly among parents of well-resourced children, to manage screen time and stop the use of these devices in the bedroom at night. That is good. All the research shows that children who are more vulnerable offline are more vulnerable online as well. A lot of work needs to go in to that space.

To the Deputies who are parents, there are very sound, sensible things they can do as legislators. I suggest this committee could query the Oireachtas about how AI companions, nudification apps and deepfakes - not social media - are not categorised in the EU AI Act as high-risk areas where children should not be and where there should be a lot of support. These are areas where the Deputies can say there are gaps. They can say this is not right.

We focus on social media because that is where a lot of kids are but there is a lot of the digital world out there that is not well protected. It will take the Deputies, as concerned parents, doing their piece and supporting people who are helping children who are being bullied because they are migrants or Travellers, etc. They are being bullied because they are a little bit different. Those resources are still not in place and there is not enough work being done. That needs to be pushed.

I thank the witnesses.

Obviously, we know regulation, we wholeheartedly support the need for that and we need to place responsibility on the tech companies but we cannot underestimate the need for information, education and guidance. An example was asked for earlier of an instance we might have heard of from services. We have had a young person who experienced sexual extortion in a very short timeframe. They were contacted by an unknown person and they actually mined their information online. They created an AI image of CSAM and tried to blackmail this young person. They went down and told their mother, which was obviously great, and they came to the youth service. The youth service was able to guide them and offer them support in terms of who to contact, where to get support and bringing in the gardaí.

All of that mitigates the impact of those types of harms on young people. That example really illustrates the need. This young person knew this was wrong, they went to their parent and the parent knew they could come and talk to the youth service as a trusted service that would not judge their daughter for this having happened, would not judge them as a parent for this having happened and would be able to offer them guidance, reassurance and support. It was almost something that passed this young person by. It was not something that sat with them. The next week, they were in the youth club and doing their normal stuff. When you asked how they were, it was like "oh yeah, that thing happened" but the impact was lessened so much. We have to place value on the role of youth work and other spaces to be able to offer that and make sure it is funded too.

As Ms Blackwell said, it is about the wider digital world. No one will come up with the perfect system for regulation or whatever else initially. At times, there will be overreach. We probably saw it in the attempt to deal with the rules around political ads when Meta said it was too much like hard work so it removed political ads. Maybe the world is a better place without something daft I get to put up for an extra fiver and more people get to be annoyed by it. At the same time, that does not do anything about the absolute madness and disinformation that is out there.

A ban will not work in this day and age. We need no more than what the young people yesterday said in that outright bans do not work; all they know is the online and digital world. They just need to be provided with the tools. Beyond that, we need to provide a wider framework which involves taking on the tech companies. There are a whole pile of bad actors online. There are the disorganised, the organised and even down to state actors. It is a very different world we are in. We will solve one problem and another one will be created.

I was also taken by the idea which goes back to the youth work. Even though that person went to their parent, they very quickly ended up back with youth services. It was a safe place to go and far more comfortable for them than going directly to the gardaí or whatever. You deal with absolutely everything. If there was a magic wand, what are we looking at for regulation and getting rid of the weaknesses that are in it? Beyond that, if we are looking at a sufficient number of youth services and services within school - we know the whole issue that exists - I am sure all of the witnesses could come in here and talk about the lack of funding, how it is unsustainable and the fact that even at times in seeking funding, you can end up diverting your resources to another place than where you actually want them to be. It stops multi-year planning and such.

What are the main things in relation to the services we need to put in play to protect children, the framework that is necessary and beyond that, the real killer moves we could take if we had the perfect regulation? If the witnesses could sort all of that in four minutes, I would be delighted.

I will take one part of that. The Deputy mentioned the need for additional funding. It is not necessarily always additional funding that is required-----

I meant sustainable funding.

Yes, but it is also about recognising the importance of one good adult in every young person's life and the opportunity, whether that is in the school environment and that structure or out of school in the community-----

I know I am brutal and terrible for this, but it is about that one good adult. In an awful lot of particularly complex cases, that does not necessarily exist in the way it did. I spoke with a number of youth workers and they said that where previously you had the good granny, you do not always have that. I know there are hard to reach and more complex cases and we then need to deal with a wider cohort but can we put somebody in play who can make up a part of that deficit?

The Deputy is absolutely correct in that. It does not always have to be the family member. It can be that person, like the youth worker Ms Laffey alluded to, in a youth service or a mentor who can be identified in a formalised relationship that has been developed to allow those young people to have that relationship and that trusted person to talk about what they have come up against but also to get guidance on a regular basis. We need to knit that in to every programme that is done, whether that is in school or as we do within Foróige, and put in place opportunities for young people to develop and to grow.

In the space of a youth club or youth project, it is about them learning all the time, and not necessarily just as a byproduct of talking about online spaces. It can be much broader than that. It is about giving those young people the skills and attitudes to be able to make decisions outside of that context.

There is also the importance of universal access for young people. This is because, as was just alluded to, there are those harder-to-reach young people. We are often engaging with young people when they have come into contact with another service. There can be blockages that young people come in contact with. It is about them having the opportunity to engage regardless of who they are. They should be able to connect with a youth project and service and get those supports. As their needs are identified, more intensive supports must be put in place. Currently, Government policy has limited access for young people because of the targeting in place. It is a challenge then for young people to get the supports they require.

It is a tool.

Regarding legislation and policy, the child rights impact assessment is one tool that has had a lot of research put into it. As for what regulation can do, it is key, if policy is going to be made to protect children's rights, that it have children's rights at the forefront and deduce certain areas. From the technology perspective, it could potentially stop these designs coming forward in advance because they will negatively impact children's rights. If we are consistently using this existing tool to determine whether something is going to impinge on a child's rights, I think this would be the key for policy and legislation moving forward, and specifically in this kind of technology sphere as well.

It is also useful to note it is in Ireland's existing strategy for children - I forget its exact name off the top of my head - that children's rights impact assessments should be developed for policy, strategies, legislation and all Acts that impact children.

Just to come in on the regulation side, one thing we need is greater specificity. The Article 28 guidelines, for example, talk about doing these risk assessments but no template has been given and the providers are also being allowed to do it themselves. Better recommender systems for children or safer systems are spoken of, but they are not specific.

They are almost useless.

They do not say recommender systems cannot be used based on profiling children. They say explicitly stated interests should be prioritised over this kind of information that providers gather through profiling. How can it be proved, though, that companies did not prioritise? I think there is a real issue with the language, certainly in the Article 28 guidelines. We need that clarity to ensure enforcement is possible. If we look at something like the investigations the Data Protection Commission has carried out, it has subsequently issued very high fines to a number of companies based in Ireland. I think about €4 billion worth of fines. My understanding, though, is that only 0.6% of that has been recouped because all the fines are tied up in legal cases.

Yes.

The companies are disputing everything. Unless we have that clarity, therefore, we are going to find that the same thing will happen and that things will be dragged through the courts. Reddit is already suing Australia. Absolute clarity on the protection of minors in these online environments is vital.

These platforms profit by keeping people online and whatever works, they will do. They have the resources to put your lights out, no matter who you are.

I will take five minutes now and then we will go to Deputy Currie. We might then see if we have 30 seconds to a minute to get a closing remark from everybody.

I will stick on the same topic. All the witnesses mentioned children's rights. There was specific mention of upholding all their rights simultaneously. In this space, then, we can see that their rights are competing. There is that right to connection and the right to creativity, but children's right to privacy and safety is just not being upheld in any way at the moment. We know that outright bans, and all the regulation and legislation, just like with alcohol, vaping and things like that, will not protect children alone, but we have to keep going in that direction. We are all going to be watching how this plays out in Australia. We were watching how France and the UK took on adult content.

I was in Brussels last week. I had an online safety report I wanted to deliver to MEPs, and they are all very excited about the Digital Fairness Act that will be coming in next year. Hopefully, it will be tackling dark patterns and algorithms. We know there is the new Irish digital wallet coming, the online safety code is in place and we have the blueprint being trialled in six countries in Europe. A lot is happening, although we wish it would happen faster. Going back to the point around knowing we need legislation and regulation, we also know the rights of children are being competed against. Maybe we will start with the witnesses from the Children's Rights Alliance. How do we give children their right to connection while maintaining their right to safety and privacy? I do not know if it is possible to prioritise rights. Maybe you cannot in this area. I feel the right to safety, if there was a hierarchy of rights, would be higher than the right to connectivity or is it the case that all rights are equal?

It is absolutely extraordinary that across Europe parliamentarians, in particular, seem to have been convinced there was this absolute to privacy that meant children could not have this right to be prevented from harm. In European terms, that is actually a much more absolute right. We are not only trying to catch up on the 20 years when the companies were able to work away with no regulation at all, with nobody quite knowing how to regulate a virtual age, but there is also the issue where they were embedding issues that actually detracted from children's safety right across Europe. We have to work across a European level. There is no point in us just being able to regulate here unless we geoblock children from the rest of the world. That is also going to be immediately destroyed by all the children who get their virtual private networks, VPNs, and whatever it is.

We keep looking for a silver bullet when we are trying to persuade the politicians that work needs to be done and it is just not there. I think everyone here has more or less touched on the need to see if we can do better in terms of age assurance right now and if our regulator can do more in this area. It is being looked at. There is also the question as to whether our politicians can do more. When the Digital Services Act came in, it seemed to be enough, but because of political pressure, just this year, politicians were able to ask the Commission to come up with guidelines on the Digital Services Act that would deal with the protection of minors online. Undoubtedly, then, where there is political pressure, things can happen.

Ireland is taking over the Presidency of the EU Council next year. We have barely got the weakest possible regulation agreed in principle by the European Council in relation to child sexual abuse material. It will have to be developed in the coming year. It could be a really useful priority for Ireland to stop children at all levels across all of society being groomed, exploited and subject to seeing material that is entirely inappropriate and to move that regulation through. There is no fast answer. I would love one. I could sell it. I think we would not have to look for any more funding in the Children's Rights Alliance if we had that simple answer. It is about the technology companies having to do their piece and being looked out for, and it is also about politicians and society. A good bit of work is happening across all those levels, but it is hard to see.

It certainly feels as though, in the last three months especially, the whole world now has this focus on protecting children. We will just have to all keep working together as fast as we possibly can.

I thank all the witnesses for being here. It is great to be in the room with people I admire so much given the work they do. I did not hear the earlier discussion because I had other events this morning, so I am sorry if I am going back over old ground. When we are dealing with this issue, we get a real sense that the horse has bolted and we are all trying to catch up and put manners on it and put safety checks and protections in place for our most vulnerable people.

I am thinking about AI now and what we need to do to make sure the same thing is not happening with it. There are huge benefits to AI, but at the same time there are already drawbacks. I was really interested to read the CyberSafeKids report, which stated that one quarter of primary school children and over one third of secondary school students are already using AI-powered chatbots.

Likewise, a report commissioned by Oxford University Press found that only 2% of students aged 13 to 18 do not use AI for their schoolwork, while 80% report regular use. Students themselves are saying it is making it too easy to find answers without doing the work and that there is an impact on critical thinking, their ability to work independently and learning those skills. At the same time, we know that it can be of huge value to children. Where do we need to go on this, learning from the last 20 years?

When we talk about AI, we need to be more specific and talk about generative AI in relation to online safety issues rather than targeting AI more generally because there are lots of benefits to it, even for young people, across the board in terms of creativity. When we talk about AI, we need to be more specific in aligning it with the risk to young people from the creation of misinformation, disinformation and the child sexual abuse material, CSAM, that we are already seeing. As the Deputy says, it feels like the horse has already gone out of the barn. In terms of having wraparound regulations, a bottom-up or community-led approach involving enhancing people's digital literacy skills in relation to misinformation and disinformation to empower young people, parents and the wider community to have a balanced approach to AI, and promoting the positives while mitigating the risks, is needed. Work is ongoing in Europe, particularly in the European Digital Media Observatory, EDMO, to mitigate the spread of misinformation and disinformation. We need both a bottom-up and a top-down approach.

I completely agree on the need for comprehensive digital literacy. There are models like Finland, which is well documented-----

That was my next question-----

The Finns have embedded critical digital literacy into the curriculum. In fact, they have a cradle-to-grave approach and are looking at upskilling all citizens. They have been doing this since 2014 and as a consequence, they top the media literacy polls in Europe. We can look at other models in similarly sized countries and see how they are working. When I say digital literacy is embedded across the curriculum, students could be in an English class looking at persuasive language or an art class looking at manipulation of images, which is so pertinent in today's world. There is a real urgency to this. A report was published by the Ombudsman for Children last week, which I was discussing with Ms Keane earlier. The authors surveyed 15- and 16-year-olds and found that over 60% had been exposed to extremist views and ideologies online versus 6% offline. That is a very good example of the problem of the artificial amplification of misinformation and disinformation. Going back to rights, the right to true and accurate information is being undermined every time we go online because we are not getting on top of it. There is an urgent need to upskill all citizens, but particularly children.

On the regulation side, we have an AI Act at the European level but child protection was not its primary focus so, as a consequence, it is not very strong on child protection measures. As Ms Blackwell referenced earlier, even two years ago AI chatbots were not what they are now and were considered a limited risk. Now, of course, we would consider them high risk, especially knowing where they can go. There have been some well-documented cases of suicide. We also have the global context, where the US is removing all restrictions on AI innovations on the basis that this is a race against China. They believe that they cannot impede innovation in any way by putting guardrails around AI. President Trump has just signed an executive order putting a moratorium on regulating AI, so Europe really must stand strong. The idea that we would water down our AI Act is really worrying in this context. We have to be really forward looking and watch where this is going. China is looking at limited-use models for AI and trying to keep a level of control. They are not doing that in the US and we are using a lot of the US technology. There is an urgent need to put guardrails around this. We did not do it with social media and we know where that got us. We urgently need to do this. Children are accessing AI very frequently. We are monitoring it this year and it is even higher than last year.

Has AI come up already today?

We will give Ms Murphy a chance to reply.

I will come in very quickly on what Ms Cooney was saying. The thing about AI, which came up earlier because it has boomed in the last two to three years as an issue, is that it has exacerbated a lot of the already existing online harms. For example, AI is behind recommender systems. That is what is pushing recommender systems and algorithms. It has always been there but there is now a big push on generative AI and using it for educational technologies. That is what has created its bigger presence. From a regulatory perspective, we would argue that the EU's AI Act did not go far enough. We could see in earlier drafts that things like recommender systems were deemed high risk but by the time the Act was finalised and published, recommender systems were no longer categorised as high risk. AI chat companions are not considered high risk and we are really only seeing educational technologies in the high-risk sector. We would like to see the Act go a bit further, if possible.

We could all stay for the day talking about this but I must now ask everyone to make a short closing comment. If we stick to approximately 40 seconds, we should get the secretariat and everyone else out on time. We will start with SpunOut.

We thank the committee for the invitation to join in this conversation today. It was really interesting for us to talk about that balancing of the right to participate with the right to safety and privacy. For us as a digital organisation, our focus is on meeting young people where they are at and they are often online. Coming up to Christmas, I want to remind committee members and all of their constituents that we have an amazing Text About It service where users are texting online but are engaging with a team of clinical staff and over 160 volunteers. The team meets young people and people of all ages where they are at. There are obviously many harms online but there are also really positive digital solutions that are available when other services are closed. They are there 24-7 to meet people in their hour of need. That is the message I want to leave with the committee today.

Thanks Ms Keane. Now we will go to Foróige.

I would conclude by reinforcing what we said earlier, which is that it is essential that all young people have the opportunity to learn the skills for keeping safe in online spaces. All young people should have access to youth work and have support from trusted adults, trained youth workers and volunteers to access programmes like the Connect Safely programme. A wraparound ring of support is needed to help them to navigate life in the 21st century, a life that is lived in both online and offline spaces. Investment is crucial so that the online safety risks can be mitigated and the benefits of technology can be fostered for young people.

Thank you very much. The National Youth Council Ireland is next.

I thank the committee members for their questions today. The message we would like to leave, in the context of this discussion around online safety for children and young people, is that we must ensure that there is consistent Oireachtas engagement with children and young people directly to talk about these issues. Rather than having us feeding into the committee, it is really important that the committee hear the youth voice directly. Deputy Murphy spoke to the importance of that yesterday at a meeting of the EU affairs committee. If we want to talk about online safety and young people, it is really important to do so directly. When we are talking about AI and youth work projects, we have conducted citizen juries with young people on some of the really important issues around AI. The committee will never get a better perspective on young people's views than by speaking to them directly. I would encourage the committee to engage directly with young people in the new year.

We actually have two sessions planned, one on child poverty and the other on well-being, and we will be engaging with young people directly so Ms Walsh can take that as a given. The Children's Rights Alliance is next.

Thanks for having us here today. Across Europe, you are not allowed to buy poisonous baby formula, toys that do not have a CE mark or cars that are not technically safe, although the driving of the car may be difficult. We should be able to get there as well, across the European Union, with online safety for children over time. It will take rights-based regulation and more action on malignant actors online, more enforcement, better age assurance, safety by design and our national strategies and policies all combining to recognise children's rights.

Thank you very much. Finally, we have CyberSafeKids.

There is no silver bullet solution and we are all agreed on that. We need societal interventions that encompass education, particularly critical digital literacy. We need parental supports and resources and we need regulation that will make a difference. To my mind, that is going to involve independent risk assessments supported by trusted third-party age verification to really ensure that children can thrive in digital spaces.

I thank the witnesses for their wonderful engagement this morning and the work they continue to do in this important space. I thank all the members. There are only two left but we are a committed and engaged committee. I especially thank our secretariat, whose staff work really hard all year. I wish all of their families a safe and happy Christmas.