The failure to agree European-wide online child protection laws is to the “collective shame” of political institutions, the Minister for Media has said.
Patrick O’Donovan said he is “annoyed” and “frustrated” that new child safety laws, which can only be agreed at European Union level, have so far failed to “stop large companies from making immoral sums of money on the backs of exploiting children”.
Mr O’Donovan was speaking after the Government agreed this week to set up a new digital wallet, which would be connected to PPS numbers, to verify the ages of children online.
The Minister suggested the app, which has already been developed and will be tested early next year, could also set age limits for pornography websites. Mr O’Donovan said online child safety is “the public health policy issue of our generation ... no more than the smoking ban was back in the late 90s or early noughties”.
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The Government is moving forward with its own mechanism to set age-limits for social media, while it waits for the EU to agree to either a ban or an EU-wide online age limit. Mr O’Donovan said he must explain to the public why Ireland could not set the kind of social media ban for under-16s that Australia has implemented this week. Under the Digital Services Act, a member state like Ireland cannot have a digital policy that is different from the rest of the EU.
Over the course of a press conference on Tuesday, Mr O’Donovan described the slow pace of online child protection at EU level as “disappointing”, “tiresome” and a “failure”. He criticised the European Commission for promising an expert committee on the issue “which hasn’t even been set up”. The commission is demonstrating its “clunkiness” and failing to respond to child safety concerns. Asked about his annoyance with the commission, Mr O’Donovan said: “Is it that apparent?”
[ Social media ban for children aged under 16 begins in AustraliaOpens in new window ]
“There is no greater responsibility that politicians, whether they’re appointed in the commission, or elected to the parliament or the Oireachtas could have than to protect our children and our young people, none. And I think the failure of the commission and the failure of the European institutions to act in a singular voice in this is to our collective shame.”
He said he wants 2026, including Ireland’s presidency of the council of the EU, to be “the year of the protection of the child online” and that “stock will be taken of what Ireland is doing”.
Mr O’Donovan said the Government has developed a “trusted age verification tool, through the digital wallet, to ensure that only adults can access pornography and similar content”. He declined to say if Ireland is planning to advocate for age limits on pornography websites at EU level, similar to existing legislation in the United Kingdom. Mr O’Donovan appeared open to the idea of a social media ban, and said: “Let’s see how Australia works out.”
The new app was developed within the Department of Public Expenditure and reform. It will be tested in the new year through a pilot scheme based on 2,000 people. This will be followed by legislation in 2026 to support the broader “roll-out” of the app.
It is understood the legislation is intended to place limits on what data can be collected by the platforms that interact with the digital wallet to limit social networks from accessing people’s PPS numbers and dates of birth when trying to verify their age. Instead, the digital wallet could be able to send a token to a site to verify the person is over the age of 16 or 18, while preserving their privacy.
Coimisiún na Meán, the media regulator, will be asked to carry out a national survey of the experiences of children online to ensure their voices are considered in any legal reform.
Mr O’Donovan said there was “no resistance” from the social media companies to age-verification for children, and suggested that opposition would be comparable to the alcohol industry “saying that you shouldn’t age check a five-year-old sitting up at the [bar] counter”.
He spoke as the Dáil heard a ban on social media for under-16s “amounts to putting a sticking plaster on a gaping wound”. Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns called for the regulation of algorithms that boost extremist content as a “first obvious step”.
Ms Cairns raised the issue of the Australian social media ban for under 16s, a world first, as she highlighted the case on Tuesday of the teenager jailed for sexual abuse of his six-year-old sister.
The boy was given a digital tablet at the age of five with no parental controls on it. “He had totally unsupervised access to the internet. By the age of just six, he was viewing pornography for hours every day,” she told the Dáil.
“This boy ultimately uploaded child abuse images of his sister online, prompting his arrest.” The judge “likened unchecked internet access to children playing with matches”.
Most social media companies already have an age limit of 13 which “just isn’t being enforced”, she said.
