Tech f irms must block porn, demands Martin
FF leader urges ministers to push for ban on child access to adult material
FIANNA Fáil leader Micheál Martin has said that tech firms must stop children from accessing pornographic material.
Mr Martin said that the ‘onus’ must now be placed on the tech firms to try to solve the issue of children accessing pornographic material online, adding that his party was working on plans that would see more responsibility placed on them.
‘I think there has to be a stronger onus on the companies in terms of filters,’ he said. ‘At the minute it’s open access the minute someone buys a phone or whatever – whereas, actually, something should be hard to access from day one.
‘So I think there is a huge responsibility on the companies, and the Government needs to engage with the companies in that regard. Because I think, and as I said this morning, what children and young people are exposed to today is something we would not have comprehended 20 years ago in terms of the access they have to technology, and then children need to be protected,’ Mr Martin told the Irish Daily Mail.
The Fianna Fáil leader said that the Government must do more to prevent children having access to pornography and he questioned Health Minister Simon Harris’s comments earlier this week about being worried about children engaging in viewing pornographic content.
Earlier this week, Mr Harris said: ‘What your child is accessing on the device in their pocket, or their iPhone or their television, or indeed their friend’s phone, is something that I know worries everybody as a parent.’ And he said that politicians can no longer dodge their responsibility for tackling the crisis. ‘The days of burying our heads in the sand and doing nothing are over – and as policymakers we have significant responsibilities,’ he said. ‘We must make ourselves uncomfortable by challenging ourselves on these issues, we must do better and, as a result of doing better, the country we live in would be better.’
Mr Harris is the most senior member of the Government to speak publicly about the growing problem of children’s access to pornography – and the mounting evidence of a connection to sexual crimes by young people.
When asked about the Minister’s comments, Mr Martin said: ‘What I would like to see is has the Minster any proposals instead of just saying he has issues about it.’
He added that Fianna Fáil would actively engage with tech companies if in power. ‘We would pursue this very actively and I have said this before. To be honest, I think we need to move on from the outrage and the rhetoric and we need to actually come up with concrete proposals,’ he said.
Mr Harris’s intervention, is likely to fuel pressure on the Government to act sooner. He made his comments at the launch of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s annual report for last year, which warned of a huge increase in reports of sexual crimes.
During the launch, the centre made reference to a study by NUI Galway from last year which anonymously surveyed just over 2,000 students online on their engagement with pornography.
It found that 53.3% of boys and 22.8% of girls had viewed pornography for the first time between the ages of just ten and 13.
Mr Harris said he was ‘surprised’ by this figure and he didn’t realise so many were accessing pornography at such young ages. ‘Technology can be a wonderful thing, but with advancements in technology does come great risk,’ Mr Harris said.
He was shocked to learn that children as young as ten are now accessing pornography online, which he said gives them a ‘false reality’.
‘They’re learning of an environment where sex is often violent, where it’s often domineering and where women are generally the subservient partners,’ he said.
seán.dunne@dailymail.ie
‘We need to move on from rhetoric’