DUBLIN — The Irish national parliament’s Joint Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport met Wednesday to discuss regulation of online platforms and improving online safety, including calls for stricter age verification by adult sites.
In a written statement submitted prior to the committee session, Detective Chief Superintendent Barry Walsh, who heads up the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau, decried what he called “the widespread and unrestricted availability of pornography.”
“As an overarching observation, it is difficult to understand why robust age verification is not yet a standard operating procedure in respect of any platform where pornography or other child inappropriate content is either readily accessible or where there is a realistic danger that it could be accessed,” Walsh argued. “This would appear to represent a very simple, yet robust, safeguard.”
In particular, Walsh called out “very extreme pornography that is serving to corrupt teenage males in particular into regarding this as normal, acceptable sexual behavior to be expressed in practice” — echoing arguments made by U.K. legislators who recently advanced provisions to make depicting “choking” in pornography illegal.
Ireland already has an Online Safety Code, which came into force in July 2025 and includes a provision requiring adult sites headquartered in Ireland to implement age assurance measures.
Sites not headquartered in Ireland are also subject to age assurance requirements, but under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Digital service coordinators in member states cooperate to enforce DSA rules, including age assurance requirements.
The European Commission has initiated formal proceedings against several adult sites for suspected breaches of DSA rules, but with a focus mainly on higher-volume sites.
In December, however, as XBIZ reported, a representative of Irish media regulator Coimisiún na Meán told legislators that his agency and its coordinator counterparts in other EU states were preparing to expand enforcement of age verification regulations to include smaller adult sites. Some Irish legislators in that meeting reportedly called for stricter age verification laws, citing France’s Law Aiming to Secure and Regulate the Digital Space (SREN) as a model.
In Wednesday’s meeting, Senator Rónán Mullen echoed that position, telling his fellow committee members: “Strict age verification is necessary to shield children from the harmful effects of pornography.”
“That’s the only thing that has worked,” Mullen said. “Look at certain states in the USA where, with bipartisan support, pornography providers have gone offline because they were civilly or criminally liable if they did not ensure strict age verification.”
Mullen’s argument echoed that of various state legislators in the U.S., who have regularly asserted that when adult sites withdraw completely from states with such laws, it indicates that the laws are “effective” or “working” — contentions predicated on the assumption that the goal is to prevent anyone from viewing adult content, rather than just minors.
One committee member, Deputy Peter Cleere, raised the practical issue of virtual private networks effectively rendering age verification measures unenforceable.
“It makes a mockery of all the regulations we want to put in place,” Cleere said. “We’re going in circles.”