Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin TD, has today established an expert group to examine the possibility of providing for an individual complaints mechanism in the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill.
The role of the expert group will be to examine whether it is practicable to include an individual complaints mechanism in the Bill and, if so, how this may be done.
The group will have 90 days from their establishment to examine the range of complex legal and practical matters that this issue raises and to report back to Minister Martin. Following this, the Minister will then consider amending the Bill as it passes through the Oireachtas on the basis of their recommendations.
The Minister is establishing this expert group on foot of two recommendations of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport and Media arising from their pre-legislative scrutiny of the General Scheme of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill.
Minister Martin said:
“If an individual complaints mechanism can be provided for through the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill then I would like to ensure that this is done.
“I am establishing this expert group, in light of the recommendations of the Joint Oireachtas Committee from their pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, to examine whether an individual complaints mechanism can be provided for and, if it can, in how it would work in practice.
“The issue of providing for avenues of redress in terms of individual pieces of content in the online world is complex and at the end of the day any proposal I bring forward to address this issue must be practical and legally robust.
I look forward to receiving the expert group’s recommendations.”
The Chair of the Expert Group, Isolde Goggin, said:
“The issue of providing for an individual complaints mechanism through the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill raises a number of practical and legal issues yet may also have the potential to have positive effects for individuals affected by harmful online content.
“We must be realistic about the challenges posed by providing for such a system while being aware of its potential benefits and seek to find workable solutions, including by examining best practices in dealing with complaints by bodies in Ireland and internationally. This is exactly what the expert group will do in bringing our recommendations to Minister Martin.”
Notes to Editor
The Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill can be found here and further information about it can be found here.
Members of the expert Group
- Chair: Isolde Goggin, former Chair of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission
- Brian O’Neill, independent academic expert on online safety for children and Deputy Chair of the National Advisory Council for Online Safety
- Ana Niculescu, CEO of Hotline.ie
- Ronan Lupton, Senior Counsel
- Baroness Kidron, children’s rights advocate, Chair of 5Rights Foundation
- Peter Tyndall, former Ombudsman, Information Commissioner, and Commissioner for Environmental Information