Student added to panel after newspaper letter

A fourth-year student from a second-level school in Co Cork has been appointed to a national advisory panel looking at safeguards to protect against cyberbullying after she wrote a letter on the subject to the Irish Examiner.

Áine Curtin, a pupil at Boherbue Comprehensive School, was invited to take part in the Safer Internet Ireland Youth Advisory Panel meetings in Dublin. She has already participated in one of its meetings with nine other youth panel members.

In her Oct 23 letter, which was prompted by the suicide in late September of Leitrim cyberbullying victim Ciara Pugsley, Áine expressed her “disappointment” with the Government response to the issue and wanted to alert ministers to the lack of guidelines for the prevention of cyberbullying.

She stressed that the last set of guidelines on bullying published by the Government dated back to 1993.

“As a teenager and frequent internet user, I don’t think this is good enough,” she wrote.

Áine also pointed to the Oct 10 death by suicide of Canadian teenager Amanda Todd, also a victim of cyberbullying.

“Obviously the Government thinks this isn’t a serious enough issue for them to be bothered with,” she wrote. “They have enough time to take money from our children and make cutback after cutback, but do nothing to save young people’s lives.”

Áine stressed that, in 1993, when current anti-bullying guidelines were drawn up, the internet was only accessed by a handful of users compared to today.

“Teenagers spend hours every single day checking their friends’ status on Facebook and yet there are no set guidelines if they are being attacked,” Áine wrote.

She wrote the letter after her English teacher, Patrick Hickey, encouraged her and classmates to investigate cyberbullying further.

During the mid-term, Áine travelled to Dublin for the first Safer panel meeting, where fellow students discussed both the positive and negative impact of the social media, as well as its future development.

She will attend a further meeting shortly and hopes the teenagers can help create a credible and useful policy to tackle the problem.

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