The Gist: Waving the Ban Hammer

This week, coinciding with Australia's new rules banning under sixteen year-olds from social media, we heard details of a social media regulation plan being trailed by the Minister Patrick O'Donovan, the Irish Minister for Media. And guess what? It's both super illegal and mysteriously leaves Meta (the social media giant everyone complains about) without any of the main risks of implementation.

Minister O'Donovan has had a sequence of ideas about limiting and monitoring citizens' access to the Internet, which he outlined to the Dáil in a written parliamentary answer on the 18th November 2025. He is currently consulting with the Attorney General as to which of these plans are legal and how that might be so.

This may not be the traditional sequence when approaching fantastically complex and sensitive issues. Some lesser people might check if their plans were illegal before announcing them. But Minister O'Donovan is not a man with a lot of time for complexity and nuance. (Recall the time he cited Sinn Féin as having responsibility for the Dublin-Monaghan bombings).

He prefers to present himself as a politician ready to stick to the delivery of his ideas, whether or not experts and naysayers point out their flaws. He is committed to a model of government where doing something is the goal and the actual wisdom of the things being done is a secondary matter left for the public and the courts to consider.

Consider it the Ministerial Dunning-Kruger approach to public policy.

The specifics of Minister O'Donovan's plans are worth looking at.

I am working across Government and with all stakeholders to ensure children and young people can be safe from harmful or illegal content online, in particular, through a new Government measure to support age verification. I am seeking the inclusion of a commitment to this effect in the Government’s updated National Digital Strategy which will be published later this year.

In addressing age verification, we must seek to ensure that there are trustworthy systems in place that are interoperable and respect users’ rights, including data protection rights. To that end, my officials are continuing to work with the Government’s Chief Information Officer and his Office to look at practical technical solutions to age verification as part of the Government's Digital Wallet being developed using MyGovID. (emphasis added)

So, he wants to bring in a national identity system, which would share details with both the state and the private sector, by confirming the age (and possibily the identity) of everyone accessing online content and/or confirm what websites that citizens were looking at to the State.

This is a huge escalation of the already announced plans by Coimisiún na Meán to build a distributed database of porn preferences. It will now directly interface with the State's central database of citizens, built on top of the Public Service Card database.

But then there was more. The Minister, following the examples of Republican State legislators in the US, suggests this State's ID system would then also be embedded into the tech monopolies of Apple and Google's iPhone and Android operating systems.

In the US this has been a lobbying aim of Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, over the objections of privacy minded Apple. Who can tell if our Minister independently came up with this same idea that happens to focus all the regulatory effort away from Meta or if it might have been suggested by a Meta policy lobbiest?

We do know that Meta has registered that it met and/or emailed the Minister to lobby him "to explain Meta's position on app-store age verification". And the Minister's plan was announced after that lobbying took place.

One US advocate, who actually favours regulating social media, describes the success of these lobbying efforts by Meta over there;

“They are doing a very good job distracting from any legislation that would hold them accountable,” said Ava Smithing, director of advocacy and operations at the Young People’s Alliance, an advocacy group that favors regulation of social media.

(By the way, Apple and Google already have excellent ways of identifying if you are an adult when you are accessing their app stores, based on whether you have a credit card. Banks, you see, are reluctant to offer credit cards to children)

MyGovID is illegal

These are not good policies. But on top of that, they are, as advanced by the Minister, not lawful policies. Let's start with the recent decision by the Data Protection Commission, who spent years considering whether the PSC database had a lawful basis for processing biometric data (facial recognition photos).

They found that the system (called SAFE 2) that both databases are built on was in breach of eight different sections of the GDPR, fined the state body €550,000 and also notified it that it would be issuing an order for them to stop processing that data altogether.

And what does the MyGovID system also require?

Oh dear.

"Does online SAFE registration involve the processing of biometric data?

Yes, the service creates and processes biometric data in the app."

- From the Department of Social Protection's own FAQ on MyGovID.

Plans within plans

So, to recap, Minister O'Donovan has announced plans before receiving his Attorney General's advices. Those plans are to integrate an unlawful state identity database with private tech companies, to monitor and identify children and adults in a way that happens to be exactly in line with the stated lobbying preferences of Meta, on the basis of no stated evidence as to the value or effectiveness of such a vast expansion of state interference.

Let's leave the last word to the Minister, during a Dáil debate, complaining about the fact that the Government's previous illegal attempts to force people to get Public Services Cards failed and suggesting he would have just carried on.

"it floundered because some interest groups outside of the House were more interested in privacy than other issues and they got their way."

This is a strange way for a Minister to describe citizens and the Data Protection Regulator for Ireland taking action to stop the Government from acting illegally.

But, I suppose, he may look forward to floundering himself, if continues to try and build Meta's favourite useless regulations on the sand of the MyGovID system.