While many parents feel like they’re drowning in the constant stream of online harms now emerging on what feels like a daily basis, the space has finally been created, both legally and technically, for the Government to do what is required.
Introduce mandatory age verification. Enforce safety-by-design for all services that engage children online. Hold the individual corporate executives, not just the corporations, legally liable for the daily harms they facilitate against our children.
When so many of our European Union neighbours are forging ahead with this, why is Ireland lagging? Our politicians clearly care about the welfare of our children, and they know what needs to be done. But they still need a stronger mandate from us – from all of us - to stand up to the admittedly colossal corporate entities headquartered in Dublin.
When it comes to social media use by children, there is now a deeply entrenched sense that Irish parents are overwhelmed: by the case of Alexander McCartney, who used fake Snapchat profiles to sexually blackmail children, some to the point of suicide; by the man jailed for operating fake profiles to groom and sexually exploit teenage girls on Snapchat and Instagram; by the deadly online “blackout” and choking challenges; by the spread of self-harm and suicide-encouraging content; by the reality that by the end of primary school more than half of our children have been targeted by the algorithm with violent and misogynistic pornography; and by the explosion of “nudify” apps being used to create sexually explicit AI-generated images and videos of classmates and teachers.
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And if all of that wasn’t enough to numb a nation into inaction, according to Interpol, the single biggest emerging threat to European society is that children are now being groomed online to carry out violent attacks, including murder.
As a people, we are well versed in the State subjugation of generations of Irish children to abuse and trauma by institutions to whom we outsourced our education and social care systems. Did we know what was happening? Yes. Did the governments of the time act? No. Why? Because socially and financially, they couldn’t “afford” to intervene.
But we learned our lesson. Reports were published. Apologies were given. Compensation schemes were established, criticised, abolished, reviewed and re-established. And we promised we would never let it happen again; we would never again subsume the interests of children to those of powerful institutions. And yet, that’s exactly what we’ve done.
In Ireland, 83 per cent of our eight- to 12-year-olds have totally unrestricted access to the online world through smart devices in their bedrooms at night. More importantly, that means the entire online world has access to 83 per cent of our eight- to 12-year-olds - at night, every night. Who else do we allow into the beds of our primary-school children? Don’t kid yourself that it’s not the same thing; it is.
We’ve been fooled into thinking a screen provides a barrier between our children and the dangers beyond it, but in reality, it’s a gateway – a portal. On one side is every bad actor who seeks access to the bedrooms and bathrooms of children; on the other side sits your child, innocently exploring life online. In between sit the platforms, engineered to encourage addictive connection without effective age checks or meaningful guardrails, offering only rudimentary reporting mechanisms after the fact, if the child ever actually tells you about the terrible thing that has happened. And terrible things are happening.
Most recently, children have allegedly been encouraged and instructed in how to take their own lives by AI chatbots they began using for homework, just like a third of Irish primary school children do.
Teen and pre-teen girls in Ireland have been groomed and raped by a man later found to have 1,629 files of child sexual-abuse material on his phone.
Meta, headquartered in Dublin, is being sued in the United States for allegedly knowing that millions of adult strangers were inappropriately contacting minors on its platforms, that its products worsened teen mental health, and that content relating to eating disorders, suicide and child sexual exploitation was frequently detected but rarely removed.
Yet still, through the purchase of every smartphone, iPad or games console for a child, we continue to hand over the reins of their personal, social and sexual development to social-media platforms and porn providers. Meanwhile, the Government continues to consider possible regulation while the universal exploitation of another generation of Irish children continues to serve the profits of “big tech”.
The European Parliament has called for a minimum age of 16 for access to social media, video-sharing platforms and AI companions; for bans on the addictive features of infinite scrolling, autoplay, loot boxes and engagement-based algorithms; and for strict age-verification enforcement, personal liability for senior managers, and regulation of AI tools including deepfakes and chatbots, echoing the recommendations published by Ireland’s own online safety taskforce last week. Citing research showing that a quarter of young people now exhibit online behaviours mirroring addiction, Rapporteur Christel Schaldemose stated: “We are finally drawing a line . . . And the experiment ends here.”
If ever there was a moment to end our collective paralysis as parents, grandparents, educators and policymakers, it is now. Ireland has been here before. We looked away while powerful institutions harmed children in plain sight, and we swore we would never repeat it. Ireland can no longer hide behind economic excuses or wait for further tragedy to compel action. The dangers are no longer hypothetical; they are documented, devastating and already shaping the lives of our young people. The only question that remains is whether we will finally learn from our past and act with the courage we once promised - or whether we will once again turn a blind eye while our children, under the glow of bedroom screens nationwide, continue to pay the price.
Eoghan Cleary is a secondary schoolteacher, currently working as an educational expert with the Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute. He serves as a director on the board of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and for the last year he was a member of the Online Health Taskforce whose report was published this week
