Donnelly: ban social media for under-16s

Children under the age of 16 could be banned from accessing social media platforms after Stephen Donnelly declared the harm being done to young people a “public health emergency”.
The health minister has compared the damage to children caused by social media companies to that of smoking.
He said the crisis requires a major response, including restricting access, automatic parental controls on home broadband and cigarette-style warnings.
“I think what we have to do is reset the conversation with the social media companies and say: ‘Right now, your product is harming children and therefore the first thing we’re going to do is to remove access for children.
“You are more than capable of making your product safe, so make it safe, and then children can have access to it,” Donnelly told The Sunday Times.
Days after Norma Foley, the education minister, announced plans to ban the use of smartphones in secondary schools, Donnelly signalled that the coalition would go further in tackling the issue before the election.
“This is a public health emergency and we need to respond,” he said. “In the same way that when the evidence emerged that smoking was bad for you, there needed to be a massive public health response.”
A new online health taskforce, to be chaired by Jillian van Turnhout, the children’s rights advocate and a former independent senator, will examine harms to children and any gaps in existing laws.
Its draft terms of reference include examining whether 13 is an appropriate age for children to access social media and the “inadequacy” of the platforms’ age verification tools.
Donnelly, 48, has asked for recommendations as soon as possible, including how the government can implement and enforce age restrictions so that users would have to provide government identification to verify they are 16 or over.
The minister said such age limits are needed “until the social media platforms are safe”.
“Social media companies say: ‘We can’t do that, it’s too complicated.’ Can you imagine if alcohol companies or cigarette companies said the same thing? You just say: ‘Well, then you take your product off the market’,” he said.
“The problem is they’re not safe so I would be taking a very hard line with the social media companies.”
As well as the taskforce, whose membership will include Mary Horgan, the interim chief medical officer, Donnelly will soon launch a €1 million campaign to highlight the extent of risk and damage caused by social media and how parents can mitigate it as well as provide extra funding to the charity CyberSafeKids.
Donnelly suggested internet service providers in Ireland should provide parental controls as a default when installing broadband in homes, meaning customers would have to choose to opt out of any content restrictions.
He is also open to placing warning labels on social media platforms similar to those on cigarettes, as suggested by Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon-general.
Donnelly said any new measures could be enforced in the same way online gambling is regulated.
In a signal that further legislation may be needed, the Fianna Fail politician said it was “too early to tell” if the EU’s Digital Services Act and Ireland’s Online Safety and Media Regulation Act were sufficient.
“You’ve ultimately got to make them accountable under law for the harm that they do,” he said.
Donnelly said that some social media content being served to young people was causing physical and mental health harms including suicide, suicide ideation, self-harm, sleep deprivation, anxiety, eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
“Then there’s another layer of really sinister harm being caused as well, which is broader social harms, sexual violence against women, violence against women, male supremacy. A lot of really, really disturbing harms are being caused,” he said.
The minister hit back at suggestions that the state could be cowed by the thousands of jobs created and billions in corporation tax revenue from social media groups with their bases in Ireland.
“I have one message for these social media companies: make your product safe for children.”
The Wicklow TD met The Sunday Times last week to talk about his record as minister for health.
He has fared better than many of his predecessors, avoiding controversies like the “stroke politics” issue that engulfed James Reilly in 2012 and the CervicalCheck scandal of 2019 that damaged Simon Harris — though not fatally, as the taoiseach’s present status attests.
As to his performance, his supporters point to progress in reducing high waiting lists, lowering healthcare costs, the expansion of women’s healthcare and other patient services and a potentially revolutionary productivity drive in which hospital resourcing is linked to staff performance.
His detractors highlight the overcrowding crisis in University Hospital Limerick (UHL), the ever-ballooning HSE budget, the still-unopened children’s hospital, waiting lists for crucial services — not least scoliosis surgery — and the slow progress on delivering Slaintecare, the cross-party plan to transform healthcare delivery in Ireland.
On Thursday, sitting in a pub in his native Greystones, Donnelly was quick to defend the progress he has made.
He wanted to talk about his plans between now and the election and top of his agenda is a crackdown on social media platforms.
His concerns over safety did not extend to UHL despite a string of controversies including chronic overcrowding.
“UHL is safe,” he said — so safe he that he said he would be willing to take his own children there in an emergency.
“Yeah, I would of course, yeah, yeah,” he said, adding: “What happened to Aoife Johnston should not have happened.”
Aoife, 16, died in 2022 from meningitis-related sepsis after she waited hours for treatment in the emergency department at UHL.
“The hospital apologised, the HSE apologised, I apologised and met her parents,” Donnelly said. “That shouldn’t have happened, things like that should never happen.”
Asked whether people should lose their jobs over the matter, the minister said that Bernard Gloster, the HSE chief executive, had started a process “in relation to named individuals”.
“I can’t comment on it, he has my full support, whatever decisions get made,” he said.
“As a general principle there needs to be a level of performance management and accountability in the HSE, which I don’t think there has ever been.”
Donnelly was confident he could deliver on Harris’s pledge, made when he was minister seven years ago, that no child in need of scoliosis surgery will have to wait more than four months for procedures.
“We’re putting the things in place, and volumes are going up. We’ll see a significant reduction this year and then I think we can get it to zero next year.”
He said the long-delayed national children’s hospital “has to open next year”, though he admitted “there may well be further delays”.
Ultimately he would not say when it would open, laying the blame for this on the contractor “still not sufficiently resourcing the site” — a claim that the developer, BAM, has denied.
EU procurement rules that prevent the state from taking past performance on big projects into account when awarding contracts for future ones have to change, Donn­­­elly said.
“None of us would hire a builder if our neighbours had said, ‘This builder is going to run way over budget and way over time’. You just wouldn’t hire them.
“I think past performance should form part of whether you agree to give people work or not, and I think that would have an immediate effect on the children’s hospital.”
Donnelly added that he wanted the coalition to go full term given the work he has left to do at the Department of Health.
But he acknowledged that it is a decision ultimately for Harris, who is also a Wicklow TD.“It’s above my pay grade, you can ask my constituency colleague.”