New law regulating social media and streaming services to be approved by Cabinet
The new bill sets out to regulate social media, online advertising, and streaming — and also proposes to create the position of online safety commissioner. Stock picture
A bill to regulate social media, online advertising, and streaming services is to be signed off on by the Cabinet today.
Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin, will bring a memo to government seeking to publish the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill.
The bill will establish a new media commission, which will include an online safety commissioner. The new body will be responsible for overseeing updated regulations for broadcasting and video-on-demand services, such as Netflix and Disney+, and the new regulatory framework for online safety.
The media commission has the potential to be one of the most powerful regulators in the State as it will oversee all media, including tech companies. It will take over the current functions of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and regulate both television and radio broadcasters.
The general scheme of the bill underwent extensive pre-legislative scrutiny for most of last year and the Oireachtas committee published a report on it in November. It recommended that there be a legal minimum age requirement for opening social media accounts and that a levy on streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime be introduced to fund independent Irish productions.
Meanwhile, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has indicated that the Government will take action to reduce working hours for public servants.
Civil service unions have welcomed a recommendation that working hours be restored to pre-Haddington Road levels.
The recommendation is being made by an independent body chaired by Kieran Mulvey, which was charged with resolving the issue under the Building Momentum public service agreement.
Mr Varadkar said: "We have a situation for a number of years where a large group of public servants were expected to work hours that they weren't paid for. And that isn't fair."
However, he did raise some concerns around the total number of working hours per week.
"The total number of working hours across the economy and across societies is a working week of about 39 hours. If we were to pare back to 37 hours or 35 hours, in some cases, we need to be sure that that wasn't going to have a negative impact on public services," he said.
"The last thing we need now is fewer home help hours, fewer speech and language hours, less time for gardaí to be on the beat — all of those things — so we'd have to see this in the round and make sure that anything we do doesn't impact negatively on the quality of public services."
