‘Ana’s death should force Government to act’ — Daly
Minister warns of online pornography menace
MENTAL health minister Jim Daly has said the horrific murder of teenager Ana Kriegel was a “stark reminder” of the dangers posed by children accessing online pornography.
Speaking at a private event last week, Mr Daly also criticised his own Government’s failure to protect children from the huge volume of explicit adult material widely available on the internet.
“Leadership is sadly lacking on a political level, I don’t mind saying it and I put my hand up as a politician and say that — both from my own Government’s prospective and governments across the globe,” he added.
In a speech at the Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI) annual conference, Mr Daly said there are “some very dark, dark elements” on the internet and that the murder of Ana Kriegel should finally force the Government to tackle to growing problem of children accessing harmful online content.
“If you stand back in the cold light of day and think what we are doing when we are giving our children unfettered, unlimited, uncontrolled, unsupervised access to the World Wide Web and all that it entails and all of that adult content being burst through in the most colourful, delightful, distorting means to very young vulnerable, developing minds,” he said.
Boy A, one of the boys convicted of the teenage girl’s savage murder, was found to have accessed violent pornography from a young age.
Gardai found more than 12,000 images, the vast majority of which were pornographic, on one of the then 13-year-old boy’s phones. A further 5,000 images were found on another phone he owned.
Speaking at the conference in Kilkenny, Minister Daly called on psychologists to support his proposal to introduce online verification codes which would prevent children from accessing inappropriate websites.
“I have put forward a proposal to my own Government to have an online verification code which is something I very strongly feel,” he said
“I would love to see the PSI working in that area because your voices as psychologists on the ground, on the front line who understand the impact the internet is having on children in a negative sense and can appreciate that.
“I think your voice articulating that would be extraordinarily powerful and would really enhance and help people like myself to get this centre stage,” he added.
Mr Daly said European governments should lead the charge on introducing tighter controls on adult internet content and introduce restrictions on children accessing material. He also said Gay Byrne would have hosted a Late Late Show focusing on the dangers posed by the internet if he was alive and working in RTE today.
Mr Daly has faced huge resistance in Government to his proposal to introduce online verification codes which require adults to enter a specific code into a website before accessing explicit content.
The Department of Communications which is developing new online safety regulations last week said they were not examining Mr Daly’s online verification codes proposals.
The Department of Justice said it was no longer exploring the concept because it had only committed to reviewing UK laws aimed at preventing underage access to online porn which have since been abandoned.
The UK planned to introduce so called ‘‘porn passes’’ which would require people to purchase age verification codes if they wanted to access adult websites. The laws ran into a number of difficulties around implementation and raised privacy issues.
Social media websites would have also been exempt from the laws which raised questions over how effective the legislation would be in practice.
Before the plans were abandoned, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and justice minister Charlie Flanagan had committed to reviewing the UK legislation.
In the Dail last week, Mr Varadkar offered his sympathies to Ana Kriegel’s parents after the two boys who murdered her were given prison sentences: “I offer my condolences and my heart goes out to the parents of Ana Kriegel. I saw them speaking yesterday and I cannot imagine what they are going through and will go through for the rest of their lives because of what happened to their beautiful daughter.”