A FORMER TD who campaigned for mobile phone age restrictions almost a decade ago has described moves this week to limit social media to minors as ‘better late than never’.

In 2017 former Cork South West Fine Gael TD Jim Daly drafted legislation that could have seen shops fined for selling mobile phones to children under 14, as part of the Internet Access for Minors Bill.

Plans to impose penalties on irresponsible parents were floated and championed by the Drinagh native back then too, an unpopular opinion which has now come full circle.

‘One of the kids said to me the other day, they were very embarrassed at the time, to have their dad talking about banning smartphones for kids under the age of 16,’ said Jim.

‘And one of them just said to me the other day (he’s now 20), “Dad, you were right actually”.’

At the time Jim was the chair of the Committee on Children and Youth Affairs, and made headlines for floating the idea of more stringent controls on children’s use of the internet.

A highly critical letter to this paper in May 2017 wondered at Daly’s ‘crackpot input into the private lives of families’ for doubting parents’ abilities to supervise their children.

‘How dare you imply parents are lax in the supervision of their children, Mr Daly,’ said the Bantry letter-writer.

‘I do not know of even one family who allow their seven and eight-year-olds access to the dark side of anything to do with the internet’.

On Wednesday Taoiseach Micheál Martin brought a memo to government outlining Ireland’s commitment to follow France in a bid to introduce legislation and develop an age verification system for the use of social media.

While late, Jim says that he welcomes the government’s actions ‘absolutely’.

‘I guess politics is very reactive by its nature. And I guess, I was more proactive. It’s something I’ve learned and I would often pass comment now saying, God I was trying to get that on the agenda all those years ago. So politics tends to wait for people, for there to be a bit of an outcry and things go wrong.’

‘I remember one of the standout comments at the time was how old did I think that children should have a smartphone. I said, as soon as they’re old enough to let them watch pornographic material’.

Daly also says that while he wasn’t ‘shot down completely’ back then, his perceived radical plans were not ‘greeted with the enthusiasm that it would be now’.

Today, Jim believes that the anonymity of the internet is the ‘single biggest challenge’ with social media. ‘That is the step that I would like to see happen first and foremost,’ he said. ‘On the internet there’s no accountability at all, and anybody who’s anybody can publish whatever they like.

‘We sometimes might over-focus on the pornographic content or the violent content but you know, there’s also just basic lies, disinformation, character assassination. I think we need that piece, that everybody has to be identifiable.’