Plans to verify the ages of children who use social media as part of a wider move to set a digital age of consent will be considered shortly by Government.
Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan is to bring a memo to Cabinet in the coming weeks that will propose linking a child’s age with their online MyGovID account as part of a plan to increase protection for children online.
It comes as Instagram and Facebook have started shutting down social media accounts of children in Australia believed to be under the age of 16, as the first age-based social media ban in the world comes into effect.
On December 10th, Australia will become the first country to impose a strict social media ban for children under the age of 16.
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Mr O’Donovan said he and his Ddepartment met representatives of the Australian government in recent weeks to discuss its ban.
Australia is not subject to the same digital services regulations that apply to EU member states including Ireland, he said.
Speaking at Dublin Airport on Thursday in advance of a trip to the European Council, Mr O’Donovan said he hoped to bring a memo to Government “before Christmas” around the “digital age of consent and age verification”.
“To me, this is the obvious starting point,” he said.
The Government is planning to make online child safety a key theme of Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union in the second half of 2026.
While Government believes online child protection would be more effective when decided at a European level, it is also trying to bring forward its own domestic legislation to protect children on social media.
The Minister said that, as a parent and a teacher, he was “very concerned about the appropriateness of what some children are seeing online”.
Mr O’Donovan said that “in an ideal world” it would be better for the European Union to act in unison on the issue of online child safety, but the EU was a “gigantic organisation” that “moves slowly”.
“I’m going to lay out in terms that I hope will get a lot of support that Ireland really wants to make our presidency of the union next year about the protection of the child online,” he said of the planned discussions at the council meeting.
He said, separate to EU discussions on the issue, there was “an impetus for us to do work at home”.
While the Australian government places the responsibility for verifying users’ ages on platforms such as Meta and YouTube, Ireland is planning on creating an online wallet as a practical, technical solution to verify the age of social media users.
Coimisiún na Meán, the media regulator, would be responsible for deciding when and how a social media platform should use age verification.
Mr O’Donovan’s department has been working with the Department of Public Expenditure and the Department of Social Protection to introduce an online age verification tool that would be linked to the existing MyGovID, the online identity platform that is used to access social welfare payments.
The office of the Government’s chief information officer, which is based in the Department of Public Expenditure, has been designing the digital wallet based on MyGovID which would be compatible with online age verification.
Officials in the Department of Media and the Department of Public Expenditure recently met to discuss bringing forward the proposal.
The Government has already been discussing the use of the new wallet with technology companies such as Google and Apple and it is expected the wallet will be tested under a pilot scheme. Data protection concerns and the views of children themselves will also be considered.
Like all EU member states, Ireland is regulated by the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires online platforms accessible to children to put in place “appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security of minors” on the platforms.
The same regulation says that platforms will not be required “to process additional personal data to assess whether the recipient of the service is a minor”.
Under the DSA, member states such as Ireland are required to help create consistent rules for online moderation and the digital market across Europe, meaning that one country should not have a different social media policy to the rest of the EU.
There is still a debate within the EU about what the digital age of consent should be, and whether a social media age limit should be set by governments or by a child’s parents.
