I move: “That the Bill be now read a Second Time.”

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy McConalogue, and the officials from the Department. I thank them for being here. I also welcome Sarah Haire and Stephen Browne, guests of Seanadóir Mullen. I believe Seanadóir Mullen is sharing time with Senator O'Reilly. Is that agreed? Agreed.

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. This Bill proceeds from a number of core principles. The first is that pornography is harmful to society and access to pornography is particularly harmful to young people. We need to accept and internalise that enabling or permitting young people to access pornography is a form of child abuse, affecting not just the young people themselves but also others whom they encounter in their lives. The work of the regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, is welcome and important, but activity in the regulatory space is not sufficient and will not on its own protect young people from exposure to pornography. It is the norm in our society that we criminalise intended or reckless behaviour which causes serious harm to others, so it is past time that regulatory activity was underpinned by clear statute law under which providers of online pornography who do not ensure their content cannot be accessed by minors and who do not carry out age verification to secure this goal are guilty of a criminal offence.

People's privacy is important, but subject to the higher good of child protection. This Bill, without in anyway sympathising with pornography use, addresses privacy concerns by providing for multiple approaches to age verification. Where there is a will, there is a way. We have the strange situation where big-tech companies drag their feet and talk up the difficulties and downsides of excluding categories of people from access to their product, yet when it comes to the purchase of goods it is well within their capacity to insist that only those who make online payments, including by way of credit cards that can only be held by persons over 18, may access their services. This Bill breaks new ground in providing that the requirement of the use of such a credit card as a condition of viewing pornographic content would satisfy an age-verification requirement.

The perfect need not be the enemy of the good. Those who wish to talk down efforts to restrict access of minors to certain online content like to talk about workarounds to which young people can have resort to circumvent restrictions. The use of virtual private networks, VPNs, is frequently touted. As we are seeing with the ban on social media access in Australia concerning under-16s, the policies and mechanisms will need refinement. Indeed, they may need continual refinement in order to secure the goal of online safety. The difficulty of finding the magic bullet, the complete solution first time out, need not trouble us as long as we are clear about our core objective, and that we are committed to taking serious steps. If, as a result of enacting legislation such as that before us today, we ensure children and young people are not normally able to access pornography online, we will have begun to put a bit of much-needed smacht on the pornography industry - and what an industry it is. According to The Guardian, the global adult entertainment industry generates an estimated $78 billion to $97 billion in annual revenue. As many adult platforms are privately owned and operate discreetly, exact figures vary, but the market easily surpasses the combined revenues of traditional sectors like Hollywood and major professional sports.

Time does not permit me to get into all the detail about the harm pornography consumption does, but there is a reason this Bill focuses on preventing the harms done by pornography, separate from the many other threats to online safety which the regulator must also address. The reason for this is that the pornography industry is so vast, and it is not that the consumption of some of its content may sometimes be harmful to children; it is that all of it is always harmful to young people. Pornography being accessed by children requires a particular response. The regulator can tell a content provider to weed out harmful elements of its context. We see with social media that it is so hard to weed out the harms that many governments are proposing to restrict access altogether before a certain age. If this is true of social media, not all of which almost by definition can be directly harmful, the complete ban approach must also apply to young people and pornography access. Not only that, something more than regulatory sanction, even criminal sanction for repeated non-compliance or the failure to comply with formal notices, is needed. Exposing young people to pornography must be the crime.

Pornography and alcohol consumption are unique predictors of sexual assault victimisation for college females. The combined effects dramatically increase the odds of victimisation, and that is partly because pornography minimises sexually aggressive acts. With an increasingly higher use of porn, it is more likely than men will be more likely to rape, commit sexual assault, be sexually entitled and have hostility towards women. I am quoting studies, by the way, in all of these cases. Pornography routinely depicts the objectification of and violence towards women, and these images create abnormal sexual expectations, as we all know. Men's consumption of pornography impacts their view of women in measurable ways, including, but not limited to, objectification and acceptance of sexual mistreatment of women, etc.

As with other evils, people may not always realise what they are getting into. In Strasbourg recently at the Council of Europe, I secured various amendments to a report, Violent Pornography: A Test for Human Rights, which was adopted by the Assembly. Arising out of an amendment I tabled, it was resolved that, even where not extensively violent or extreme, the making and distributing of pornographic content may proceed and benefit from situations where participants are affected by violence, coercion and a lack of freedom, including situations of social or economic disadvantage, addiction, or where participants have been victims of abuse, and it may perpetuate all these situations. Child abusers under 21 report difficulty controlling their pornography use and often cite such as a factor leading to their abuse of other children. I could say more. Studies of the brain show that if someone is addicted to pornography they tend to have problems at work and with carrying out matters of daily living. There is a lot of talk these days about the failure of some young people to launch in life. Pornography addiction is very much part of this story.

We are up against a harmful behemoth and we must wonder at how we let such a situation develop to the point where it may seem out of control.

The extent of the industry and the challenge of curbing it should not paralyse us, however. There is something more important and powerful than the pornography industry, and that is the love that parents have for their children. We as legislators must show solidarity with those parents and guardians and take the first steps towards putting those who would expose their children to this danger where they belong, which is in the dock. That is the serious intent of the Bill. Fines by a regulator are mostly a corporate problem. Sentences by a court represent the more powerful judgment of a society on those who would harm children. Again, there will be objections that it will be difficult to prosecute certain players abroad for their involvement in exposing minors to online pornography, but in France and certain states in the US, we have seen how ALAW, a company owned by a Canadian investment fund laughably called Ethical Capital Partners, decided to suspend access to its content on its main pornography sites, all because of laws passed that require publishers of pornographic websites to implement age verification tools for visitors. It is amazing what can be done when people find the will.

This Bill is a revised version of similar legislation that I brought forward in 2024. Quite a bit has changed since. There is considerable ongoing discussion about the importance of online safety, heightened public concern and awareness. I acknowledge the work done by Coimisiún na Meán as the regulator in the online space. With all it has on, its role requiring parental controls, reporting, flagging and complaint mechanisms is important. It is undoubtedly attempting to fulfil its remit in demanding age assurance mechanisms of online platforms. To be fair to the regulator, it explicitly mandates that simple self-declaration, such as ticking a box or entering a date of birth, is not sufficient for age assurance.

There are four big problems, however. First, age assurance, which can involve age estimation mechanisms, is not the same as strict age verification. Second, it is left to the platform under the code, to some extent, to determine the precise mechanism that it uses for age assurance. Third, the commission deals mostly with online platforms headquartered in Ireland. In no sense has it universal jurisdiction to make demands and secure the accountability of platforms and websites providing pornography online to users capable of accessing it in Ireland. Fourth, regulation, even with the power to impose fines or to demand actions, is more vague. It invites tech companies and platforms to play to ducks and drakes and, in the end, lacks the focus and, to use an old word, lacks the exemplarity of criminal law.

On the numerous occasions that Coimisiún na Meán has come before the Oireachtas joint committee on which I sit, it has not been able to reassure us that persons under 18 are no longer able to access pornography in Ireland. It remains the case that if you want to buy a pair of shoes, you must in all likelihood use a credit card and therefore are subject to a higher degree of scrutiny than if you want to view pornography. That is because the pornography industry thrives on putting out free content already harmful to people, on the back of which they can mine data, sell advertising and make online sales. When I brought the previous version of this Bill before the House in 2024, the then Minister noted that in some US states pornography providers had gone offline but that, unlike those states, member states of the EU were not free to act alone. The Minister invoked the country-of-origin principle and said that Ireland could not unilaterally act nor should it. That situation seems to have changed because France, for one, has shown, as I understand it, that it is not bound by the terms of another member state's regulation of platforms that happen to be headquartered in that other member state. In France, platforms that fail to implement approved privacy preserving systems risk fines of up to 2% of their global revenue or nationwide blocking by Internet service providers.

It is fair to say that, while it pursues objectives in this area, the European Union has avoided any suggestion that it would block member states from tailoring legislation or regulation for their own jurisdictions. I am not saying that Ireland should not continue to interact with our EU counterparts, but I do not believe we are restricted from introducing criminal offences as this Bill proposes to do. In this case, in interacting with platforms and online service providers on age assurance mechanisms and requirements, the coimisiún would have to take on board what age verification would now mean under this Bill were it to be enacted. Of course, online providers not currently subject to the writ of Coimisiún na Meán would have to consider the implications of the legislation for themselves.

Regarding this Bill, it has a wide reach because it is aimed at anyone who is responsible to any extent for determining, controlling, hosting or sharing content on a website. It is aimed at app store services and any provider of an online service that facilitates the creation or generation of pornographic content online, including by way of AI. The obligation is to ensure that pornographic content is not accessible to any person in the State under 18 and to require any person accessing pornographic content through these services to fulfil age verification requirements. The definition of pornographic content is careful to ensure that depictions of sexual activity that would occur, for example, in artistic or informational contexts that would not be objectionable are not caught by this legislation. The Minister of State will know there are concerns abroad about the State acting as a gatekeeper and identity checker and about the dangers of a "papers, please" approach to access to the Internet. This Bill addresses those concerns by providing that the Minister may designate certain classes of documents that can be used for age verification services. Those who are concerned about the access of third parties may note that there are strict limitations in the Bill on how, when and to what extent age verification data can be shared.

I will conclude on this point and let my seconder speak. As a core principle, the securing of privacy for those wishing to access pornography must come second always to the cause of protecting children from exposure to pornography. I will resume on that point later. I thank my seconder in advance.

I thank the Minister of State very much for coming in for this Bill. I support this legislation. I congratulate Senator Mullen on the work he has done on this Bill. It is very good legislation.

In a recent debate, I welcomed the Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan's, proposal to make violent pornography illegal, but it does not go far enough. The Minister has mentioned content that shows knives or explicit acts of violence, but in a lot of this content, the violence is implied. A study found that one in eight videos shown to a first-time user of most mainstream porn sites shows sexual violence. If a child accesses porn for the first time, 12% of the content shown to them on the homepage is sexually violent. Of this 12%, the content ranged from sexual activity between family members, physical aggression, sexual assault, coercion and exploitation. As Senator Mullen laid out, under Article 34 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the State has a specific obligation to protect children from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. The State is failing in that obligation. Women's Aid found that 71% of the population see pornography as harmful to society and believe it negatively impacts sexual health development, gender equality and consent. We are all influenced by the environment around us. To expect children to watch pornography and not have it impact their actions or attitude is naive and misguided.

Some of the Senators will remember the debate on RTÉ's "The Frontline" where people where advocating for pornography to be taught as part of the relationships and sexuality education, RSE, curriculum in schools. That idea was swiftly blown out of the water when young women live on air started sharing their first experiences of sex. Some of them had found their partners aggressive, with others describing how they had been choked during sex. I know of a 15-year-old girl who was dropped by her mam to a coffee shop for a first date with a boy. Everyone was wondering if there would be a first kiss or a peck on the cheek. We were all as excited as she was. What we did not expect was that when he did go in for the kiss, he put his hands around her neck. We were all shocked. Where do you think he got that idea from?

Our young girls and boys are being completely failed. They are being brought up on content that teaches men that their role is to be aggressive and dominant while teaching women that they should be submissive and abused. Many men seem genuinely surprised when women say they do not want to be choked. What does that say about our society? What does it say about healthy sexual relationships? The reality is that it is not the norm, but it has become the norm unbeknown to us, and this must change. The Government proposal is to have age verification for every media platform, essentially bringing in digital ID. I cannot support digital ID because it is incompatible with our rights to personal freedom and privacy. It also leaves the responsibility with consumers instead of expecting these large corporations to take responsibility for their content. The Bill strikes a good balance without infringing on any personal freedoms. It puts the responsibility back on the porn companies to ensure no child is accessing pornographic content. Many of these companies have their headquarters in Ireland. These companies are not looking at the ethics of children watching pornography and will not have a moral epiphany and stop it.

Unless there is a legal obligation placed on them, there will not be any change. I encourage the Government to support this Bill because there is currently nothing within our legislation limiting the ability of children to access pornographic material.

I thank the Minister of State for being here for this. It is a very worthwhile Private Members' Bill, PMB, and a very worthwhile conversation that needs to be had in relation to pornography, the legislation around it, the access to it and the protection of our minors - under-18s - online. Far too often, it has got to the stage where there are new norms developing without any controls, regulations or mechanisms around them.

The Internet, for far too long, has been the wild west. I welcome the strident work of Coimisiún na Meán, but when you listen to the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, ISPCC, and Ms Fiona Jennings, its head of policy, speak as she has done many a time at many a committee, or if you listen to Mr. Mick Moran from the Irish Internet Hotline, you realise that the web is becoming very dark for our young people. I do not know if many parents listening in here this evening realise that, when they purchase a mobile phone for themselves and hand it over to their sons or daughters as it is about to expire, or if their children are getting their first phones, the parents are handing over all the controls and everything in the phones has been turned on with regard to accessing pornography. If a business phone is left with a parent and a child, the parent or whoever accesses pornography on it, there are implications associated with work. I do not think adults realise how they are putting themselves at risk, not to mind the children they are putting at risk.

While I agree with the use of a credit card or Visa debit card as a mechanism, there is an obligation on the likes of our phone communications companies. They could turn off everything. There is nothing to stop them having their phones set so that you have to request to have them turned on and then verify they are on. We should not be handing over phones with everything left set up to enable access as easily as they are. I agree with all of what Senators said but it is not just the tech companies. The phone companies have a role to play in this, in that the devices are set at ground zero and you would then have to contact your telecommunications company to be able to turn it on. If that were done, it would be a barrier and a safeguarding measure, as the Senator spoke about in relation to protecting the child. Having an account number and asking where the phone was purchased would be a mechanism in itself, as there would be a conversation between the telecommunications provider and the young adult trying to access the phone. That is only one of a number of barriers or amendments I would look to include in the Senator's Bill.

In the EU Presidency, it is great that we are starting to have more of these conversations. We need to stop the new norms that are developing. We want our children to be protected and sheltered and to hold onto their innocence for as long as possible. However, with VPNs and where we have gone with Roblox, and given what we hear from Mr. Moran - I keep talking about that man - about what is going on, every parent should familiarise themselves with the Irish Internet Hotline and its stats. The algorithms of telephone companies or the various social media platforms are driving young boys to be more inquisitive all the time. Young boys do not set out to be inquisitive. They might start with asking one or two questions or saying that such and such a person said something. Then, all of a sudden, be it through Safari or whatever, they are accessing it through the Internet or they are talking about it. We know that the phones recognise what you speak about. If Senator Ní Chuilinn and I were to have a conversation about ladies' football, I am sure that the first thing that would come up on our Instagram feeds would be ladies' football. The same way, if young boys are having a conversation, it comes up in their algorithms. Algorithms are another thing that need to be addressed as part of the safeguarding mechanisms.

The Senator is right, in that there is no one silver bullet for this. There is a collection. Part of the collection is the telecommunications company. The second part is the algorithms. All algorithms should be removed. That would cost tech companies nothing in respect of under-18s but we should be removing the algorithms. It is not just about the pornographic imagery or sites that they are bringing them to. We also see harmful content for young females. I know that is not the purpose of the Bill, but we also have to look out for young ladies.

In 2018, I produced a Bill in relation to pornographic content for children online. It is a hard thing to think that we are still talking about regulating in 2026. It is a hard thing to believe that we still do not have the tech or telecommunications companies responsible for monitoring and controlling. It cannot fall to parents to continue to protect. It is going to come to legislators to introduce the regulations and laws to ensure protection.

Before I call Seanadóir Ní Chuilinn, I welcome her guests. They are from Kiddies Korner, KK, Crèche. I hope they enjoy their visit to Leinster House.

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Leas-Chathaoirleach. I welcome my guests to the Gallery. We are talking about the safety of children, minors and juveniles but these women have been keeping my children and the children of Crumlin safe for decades. I hope they have a meal later on in the restaurant.

I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber for this debate and congratulate Senator Mullen on his Bill, which is progressing nicely. I welcome the premise of the Bill. It aligns with the work of the joint Oireachtas committee on media and communications, with components of our recent report, as the Senator and Minister of State know, on online safety, regulation and participation. We have to stop these huge online platforms having unfettered access to our children and promoting material that is harmful and dangerous. This Bill seeks to achieve this, so I commend the Senator for his work on it.

Pornography is becoming more, not less, accessible for children as companies increasingly find new and innovative ways of producing, promoting and disseminating adult content across not just traditional websites, but otherwise normal platforms and social media websites as well. These platforms claim to have robust systems and measures in place, but very often, these measures are really just you ticking a box or filling out a form where you can say you are over 18. We have to do more and this Bill advances that policy conversation. It should be welcomed for that reason.

If we ask ourselves why we need to act, there is a clear link between exposure to pornography - in particular, violent pornography - and increased sexual violence, distorted sexual expectations as well as increasing misogynistic attitudes. These links are clear for all who have problematic pornography use, but especially so for our children who are becoming exposed to pornography at increasingly younger ages.

The Bill aligns with the recommendations of the joint Oireachtas committee to implement an age classification system. I welcome this. Our committee spent months discussing these and other issues with experts, advocacy groups, children's rights advocates and technology companies themselves. The Bill also aligns with recommendation 4 on combating image-based abuse by explicitly referencing the generation of pornographic material, which would cover AI-generated content, ensuring that children do not have access to harmful AI-generated pornographic content.

There is, as the Minister of State will know, a legislative and regulatory framework in place at European and national level that has made significant progress in recent years. The Digital Services Act, DSA, is a landmark piece of European legislation that acknowledges that, as a Union, we must act to ensure safety for all, but especially children, in the digital space. The DSA puts an obligation on platforms to have robust age verification measures in place, and as recently as March of this year, the Commission initiated enforcement proceedings against four providers for failing to protect children from accessing pornography. It is clear, though, that there are still gaps in regard to the enforceability of these measures, as many of these platforms simply have a one-click verification process still in place. We cannot accept that that is robust, as the DSA prescribes.

The Bill is a welcome addition to the regulatory framework but it does require some changes. This Bill is broadly welcome and seeks to legislate for a far more robust framework for regulating age verification that will be an improvement on simple, one-click measures which are currently the norm. However, I am concerned that in its current form the Bill would legislate for excessive disclosure of data to technology companies and impose an unnecessary requirement to hold this data for five years. In any age verification measure, we must ensure that any data disclosure requirement respects privacy rights and is proportionate to the risks involved.

The Bill also does not utilise the expertise that already exists in our media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, with no role set out for Coimisiún na Meán. With some amendments we could, through this legislation, empower Coimisiún na Meán to take a much more active role in the enforcement of any age verification regulations.

The Bill progresses the conversation on this topic by placing the focus on real, robust, enforceable verification, which is a marked improvement on the current box-ticking landscape we have already referenced. I know the Minister of State agrees on the need for a more robust approach, as is demonstrated by the development of a new tool that would achieve age verification without disclosing users' data by his Department. I hope that as a group of Senators and a group in the Oireachtas, we can work together to place that tool under this or similar legislative footing with the necessary amendments on Committee Stage.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about how best to protect our young people, especially our under-18s, from certain social media sites and pornography. The statistics from Rape Crisis Ireland are very concerning when they talk about the rise of online misogyny and what they are calling the "manosphere". It is an international network of influencers promoting male supremacy and anti-feminist ideologies. That is connected closely to multinational corporations, which are only interested in making profit, have a total disregard for harm and have recommender algorithms to spread unsuitable content to everybody, particularly children, without caring about the harm it causes.

There was research carried out recently by Professor Debbie Ging. She found that within 23 minutes of being created, fake teenage male accounts were served with misogynistic content without seeking it. That is scary. Young men are being targeted by some of these providers with unsuitable online content. Women's Aid did a survey called Evolving Manhood and found that two-in-five Irish men hold traditionalist views on gender but that rises to 67% among young men. This surveyed those aged 18 to 29 but I imagine it also affects young lads in their teenage years.

This emphasises the importance of education by parents and guardians because they have a huge role to talk to their young people and explain to them what a healthy relationship is and what is certainly not healthy. This should also happen in an age-appropriate way in our schooling system and going into third level as well. We have done quite a bit of work on this issue in higher education institutions too and sexual violence can be quite prevalent among a cohort there as well.

We all want to do anything we can to protect our children and stop them accessing pornography. I am a little concerned about some of the detail within the Bill. One part states:

Data that is collected and retained for the purpose of compliance with age verification requirements provided for under this Act shall be securely stored for a period of 5 years.

I am concerned about having that much private information in one place. About two months ago, the EU age verification app was launched and it was hacked within two minutes. It was not safe. I am concerned about that. The Bill also states:

The Minister shall prescribe a class of documents, or a combination of classes of documents, that is adequate to verify the age of each website user and which may be accepted for the purposes of fulfilling the age verification required under this section.

I am not sure what documents can be used and why. Again, I am wary of what happened in relation to the public services card, where a huge fine was served for breaches of privacy rules relating to the use of facial recognition in the registration processes. There was a fine of €550,000 in that case. There are a few things there that may need further work and clarification.

We do have our own legislation. We have the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022 which established the new media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, and put in place an online safety code. Technology is moving so fast that legislation has to keep moving as fast as well. I know the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Bill is going through the Seanad at the moment. All of that is welcome but we need to make sure that all of these checks and balances are robust and ensure the proper age verification systems are put in place.

I commend the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport on its recent report. I know it had much engagement with stakeholders. The committee on children was also doing work around keeping children safe online. It is important that one of the first recommendations in the report of the committee is to "require platforms to disable recommender algorithms entirely for children and by default for people over 18". We need to hold the media companies responsible for what they are doing. As Senator Rabbitte said, we need to hold the phone companies responsible as well. We are letting them off the hook. We need to have our regulations in place and we need to have the proper age verification but these companies need to take responsibility for the damage they are doing.

Another recommendation in the report is to "fully incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into Irish law." That is really important, not just in this context but across many different Departments in relation to child law. We need to strengthen our laws that protect children and provide them with the supports they need in life. It also recommends we enhance Coimisiún na Meán’s investigative powers. That is really important too. We need to use all of the tools we have to ensure we keep our children safe.

The definition of pornographic content here may need to be tightened a little bit because some of it could apply to films with sexual activity or music videos and so on that are not pornographic but which do include sexual activity. Just because there is sexual activity in a music video or something on Netflix does not mean it is pornographic. We need to be able to distinguish these forms of content in the context of age verification. I fully support removing access to pornography for anyone under 18 years of age. It would be an incredible thing to achieve and it is really important. I hope this Bill can lead to doing that. Nobody would oppose anything that is going to protect our children.

I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber. I commend Senator Mullen on this Bill on online age verification. It comes at a very good time. I know the Minister, Deputy O'Donovan, has this as a key priority for the Presidency of the European Council. My colleague, Deputy Kiera Keogh, has done an awful lot of work in this particular area, along with the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport. All of that work must be complimented. All of the previous speakers have spoken about how this is an issue that affects us all. This is an issue that everyone in this House and the Lower House would like to see resolved.

I am coming at this as a parent. Kids deserve the opportunity to be kids first.

Yes.

We often talk about engaging with kids and meeting kids where they are but, unfortunately, these media companies and these vultures that deal in this particular area are also trying to meet kids where they are and they are adapting every day. As a member of the AI committee, I am very enthused by the opportunity that artificial intelligence is going to bring to us across health and so many sectors like enterprise and research. The opportunities it presents are immense but there is also the dark side to all of this. I refer to the way that algorithms are manipulated and laws and safeguards are circumvented. As Senator Tully said, the age verification app was hacked within minutes of being released, unfortunately. A Bill being produced now needs to be an evolving Bill, one that can meet the demands that will present themselves in six months' time as well as the demands that are currently present.

Going back to the clear message, the basis for bringing forward the Bill is that kids deserve the opportunity to be kids first and foremost.

As Senator Rabbitte said, we will not be able to do this by just saying "No", introducing the safeguards and trying to ensure these companies comply. Parents will have to be extensively involved in this, but legislation is the only way this will be stopped. The companies we are dealing with on this are so used to avoiding a rule in one jurisdiction by somehow positioning themselves in another jurisdiction to circumvent it all. That is where we have to be more dynamic. It means we have to be able to adjust and change the legislation as we are going on. I am fully supportive of what Senator Mullen has produced here and I believe parents across the country will be fully supportive of what he is trying to achieve. It aligns directly with Government policy and what the Minister is planning to do during Ireland's Presidency of the European Council. I compliment the Senator on this.

I thank Senator Mullen for his work in bringing this legislation forward. I thank the Senators for the very thoughtful and well-considered contributions and responses to the legislation. I think we all agree that online services are constantly developing and changing. It is vital that we, as legislators, stay vigilant to any emerging trends that undermine the safety of our children and young people when they access those services.

Online safety is a whole-of-government priority, particularly when it comes to the protection of minors.

Sorry to interrupt. Is there a copy of the speech?

There should be. There are copies outside.

Gabh mo leithscéal.

This Bill is clearly aligned with that objective, as it seeks to ensure that children do not access pornographic, adult-only material by requiring online services to first verify that a person is over the age of 18. For this reason, the Government does not oppose the Bill. However, there are practical, legal and technical issues with the Bill's provisions. It also does not take account of commitments in the national digital and AI strategy published by the Government in February of this year.

Regulations are already in place to protect minors online, including specific provisions to prevent children from accessing adult-only content such as pornography. Those requirements are in both EU and national laws. Some of the provisions in today's Bill are inconsistent with those existing regulations. The EU Digital Services Act, known as the DSA, obliges providers of online platforms that are accessible to minors to put in place appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security of minors on their services. The DSA also imposes additional obligations on the very large platforms to assess their services for risks to minors and implement mitigation such as age verification. The category of very large online platforms includes several of the platforms that carry pornography. Last March, the European Commission issued preliminary findings to the effect that four providers of pornography are not effectively meeting these obligations to prevent minors gaining access.

Alongside the Digital Services Act is the online safety code, which is overseen by Coimisiún na Meán. It gives further effect to the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022 and to the EU audiovisual media services directive. The code came into full force in July 2025 and it obliges designated video-sharing platform services to take steps to reduce the availability of harmful content online and address access to age-inappropriate content. It mandates providers that carry pornography to use robust age-assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 18 from getting access to that adult-only material. These regulations have been designed to be effective and meaningful. For example, failure to comply with the online safety code can lead to fines of up to €20 million or 10% of relevant turnover. These are larger fines than those in the Bill. Moreover, continued non-compliance with the online safety code can lead to criminal sanctions for senior management, which is similar to the Bill.

The Digital Services Act has a coherent oversight network comprising the European Commission and the digital services co-ordinators in each member state. This network ensures that supervision and enforcement is conducted on a pan-European basis and addresses the fact that digital services are provided across borders. Coimisiún na Meán is the digital services co-ordinator in Ireland. The Bill does not give an coimisiún any role, which is a practical gap that undermines both the remit of an coimisiún and the effectiveness of the Bill's provisions.

The Digital Services Act is also a maximum-harmonisation regulation, which gives the advantage of providing a single rule book. This makes it more straightforward for platforms to comply and more efficient for regulators to implement and enforce. A consequence of maximum harmonisation is that member states are precluded from introducing national measures that add obligations to the Digital Services Act. The Bill would be at odds with that rule. The offences in the Bill appear to conflict with certain liability exemptions in the Digital Services Act. The regulation provides that hosting services are not liable for illegal content made available by a user as long as the hosting service does not have knowledge of the illegal content and, once it becomes aware, it works expeditiously to remove or disable it. On the contrary, the Bill could make hosting services responsible for content they may not know of.

Another concern with the Bill is the method it proposes for age verification. It provides that online services providers should require documents or credit card information to confirm whether a person is over 18 or not. While the type of documents that can be used would a matter for the Minister for justice to determine, it seems more than likely that they would be State-issued documents, such as a driver's licence or passport. These documents contain a lot of personal data, often including biometric data. Credit cards also reveal a lot more than just a person's age, for example, their home address. Typically, this kind of data is considered sensitive and must be treated with care. The collection of all this personal data is disproportionate to the misuse the Bill is trying to address. It should be sufficient for a service provider to know if a person seeking access to its services is over 18 or not. For example, they do not need to know how much over 18 the person is, so they do not need a date of birth.

We must also take into account guidelines on the protection of minors issued by the European Commission last July. They stress the importance of age verification tools that are proportionate and respect the privacy of the user. They speak of age verification as being as non-intrusive as possible. They emphasise that age verification should not be an additional means for providers to identify, locate, profile or track natural persons. The extent of the data and the processing set out in the Bill do not meet these requirements. The Bill also provides that personal data shall be stored for five years. This, too, is contrary to the European Commission guidelines on protection of minors. Furthermore, five years is too long. The data provisions also raise significant concerns when it comes to compatibility with the general data protection regulation, GDPR. The Bill is problematic with respect to data minimisation principles, the proposed retention periods, and the lack of clarity regarding data controllers and joint controllership arrangements. Accordingly, the age verification method in the Bill runs the risk of cutting across EU guidelines and introducing a solution that is not compliant with GDPR.

Finally, the Bill does not take account of the Government’s recent national digital and AI strategy which commits the Government to delivering an age-verification solution. This will differ from the solution in the Bill as it will protect users’ rights, including privacy and reveal only essential information to platforms. At the same time, it will enhance online safety by providing accurate and robust information on age. My Department is working with the Office of the Government’s Chief Information Officer to develop this age-verification tool, and to make it available as part of the digital wallet. The tool will be in full compliance with a blueprint published by the European Commission last year and will work in a zero-knowledge capacity, only confirming to a platform whether the user is over 18. No other information, such as date of birth, will be provided to the platform or stored.

I share Senator Mullen's and many of the speakers objective of protecting children from harmful content online. Therefore, the Government is not opposing the Bill. However, the Government has concerns with the approach and content of this Bill. It raises issues that point to it being incompatible with existing regulation of both online safety and data protection. Moreover, existing online safety regulation already restricts access by children to pornography and provides for age assurance measures to be in place.

An age verification solution that is less invasive than the one in the Bill is in development. This will further support the implementation of those rules while still respecting the privacy of all users.

I again thank Senator Mullen for his genuine work and effort in bringing this Bill forward and for shining a light on this massively important issue that we must collectively address in order to ensure that we protect young people. The latter is an objective the Government shares with him. In terms of developing the tools to make sure we can do that, we look forward to working and collaborating with him and everyone else in the Seanad and the wider Oireachtas.

The Government thanks the Senator for his work and for bringing the Bill forward. I am not opposing the Bill in light of the shared objective, but I have outlined the issues that need to be addressed from the Government's point of view in order that we can move forward and ensure an outcome that will achieve the very important objective of protecting young people from the very harmful online material they can often be exposed to, especially pornographic material. I thank Senator Mullen and the other Seanadóirí.

I thank the Minister of State for his reply. I also thank all the Senators who spoke, namely Senators Sarah O'Reilly, Rabbitte, Ní Chuilinn, Tully and Scahill.

The Minister of State did not comment on the core idea of the Bill, namely that criminal liability should attach to people who fail to prevent minors from accessing pornography. While I accept the general good wishes of everybody here, the Government is speaking out of both sides of its mouth. The Minister of State professes to be concerned about protecting children from pornography. He promises something in the future by way of a solution, but his contribution was full of references to privacy and protecting privacy. Protecting children is not an absolute priority for the Government on this one. That is because it is so hidebound. In the end, what the Minister of State is talking about protecting is the privacy of adults who freely choose to go online to access pornography. I am not out – nor is this Bill - to attack their privacy rights, but the Government is putting those rights ahead of what is needed right now in order to protect children from being able to access pornography. That seems to be a bizarre situation.

We cannot have a bureaucracy-as-usual approach to this problem. The problem is urgent. Children are being damaged now. Pornography serves no social good that anybody in this room can identify, yet the Minister of State is so worried about approaches that would require digital age verification that would involve the storage of data, which people would freely choose to upload or provide to a third party in order that they can access pornography. He is so worried about adult privacy rights that he is not willing to commit to what is needed to protect children from being able to access pornography now.

There is one thing the Minister of State did not say. He said that there is already existing online safety regulation restricting access to pornography, but is it working? He did not make one iota of a claim to the effect that it is working. Right now, children are able to access pornography online and the Minister of State is telling me we already have a solution to this and we are working on a better one. In the meantime, we dare not act because the European Union might not let us. That is not going to endear the European Union to parents across this country if it is true that it is preventing the Government from acting in the way the Bill proposes. It is a fig leaf of an excuse. We saw the French act in such a way that they were able to design their measure around age verification. This Government is timid on this issue. If the future proposal is on an age verification mechanism in the context of an app, that is well and good, but right now the Government is not dealing with the problem.

The Minister of State has not answered the core question relating to the Bill, which is whether the Government agrees that it should be a criminal offence to fail to ensure that under-age persons can access online pornography. Insofar as Coimisiún na Meán is concerned, this Bill excludes nothing in its approach. There is nothing to stop the coimisiún from being the organisation which, through the Minister, would designate certain documents as satisfying the requirement of age verification. What this Bill seeks to establish is what has always been the case where people engage in conducts that harm other people - that it would be a criminal offence. Right now, it is not a criminal offence to fail to ensure that children under the age of 18 cannot access pornography. That is a disgrace. The Government is continuing to disappoint people. The Minister of State was speaking out of both sides of his mouth when he said the Government is concerned about children and well done on this Bill, which we are not going to oppose but there are all these problems, especially around the privacy of people who want to freely go online and choose to access pornography. It is quite clear where the Government's priorities lie in respect of this. That is very much to be regretted.

I will make one final point. This Bill does not address the general question of adults accessing pornography, an activity that has no social utility. That is a problem which requires another social response. In the vanguard of demanding that response are the many women and feminist groups across the country that see the damage pornography is doing to relationships between men and women, although the dangers extend to men, women and children, family life and so on. It is not unreasonable or naive to hope that the day might come when pornography might not be available at all online but would be driven into the offline space. We would not be damaging free expression if we allow people certain access to pornography in the offline space. If we treat the online space as so difficult to manage in such a way that we can protect innocent users of that online space from being harmed, we would have a different attitude to what should or should not be allowed in the online space.

That is a debate for another day. For now, I can only regret that the Government has not clearly committed to supporting the principle that it must be a criminal offence, in addition to Coimisiún na Meán's regulatory work, to fail to carry out age verification and to fail to ensure that under-18s may not access pornography online.

When is it proposed to take Committee Stage?

Next Tuesday.

Is that agreed? Agreed.

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire Stáit as teacht isteach sa Teach inniu chun páirt a ghlacadh sa díospóireacht. When is it proposed to sit again?

Tomorrow morning at 9.30 a.m.

Is that agreed? Agreed.