The quantity of child pornography found on the Internet by Irish users has more than doubled and is becoming increasingly severe, a report has found.
Hotline.ie, a service set up in 1999 to tackle child pornography online, said that in the 30 months to last December, some 5,102 reports of such material were lodged with the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland (ISPAI).
Paul Durrant, ISPAI Hotline manager
Of these 671 were confirmed as incidences of child pornography.
The report found the severity of child pornographic material, reported to the ISPAI's Hotline.ieservice as openly accessible on the Internet, had significantly increased since the last study in July 2003.
Hotline said the reports lodged by Irish web surfers were all related to material located or sent from outside of Ireland.
Paul Durrant, ISPAI Hotline general manager, said: "Just because nothing illegal was traced to an Irish source is no reason for complacency.
"These reports represent thousands of Irish citizens being presented with some truly horrific material as they used the Internet and because the Internet is a transnational worldwide web, we must play our part to ensure our own doorstep is kept clean, if everyone did that, we would have a pretty clean Internet street."
He said that as Internet usage surged there was a small minority of people who have learnt to exploit it to support paedophilia and other criminal activities.
Reports of potentially illegal material to Hotline.ie have increased from 1,792 in the previous two years to 5,102 in the last 30 months.
Some 54 per cent of sightings resulted from spam email advertising suspected child pornography sites. Around 41 per cent of reports were of material, suspected as illegal, encountered by people when surfing the web.
Brian Lenihan, Minister of State with responsibility for children, said: "It is vital for their future that children are taught the life skills of using the Internet and computer applications. Therefore it's imperative that governments, industry and law enforcement work together to make the Internet a safe environment for our children," he said.
Labour TD Tommy Broughan said there was "no place for this vile material on the internet".
"There should be a zero-tolerance attitude to this particularly disgusting form of child abuse. I welcome this report and commend ISPAI for the work they have done in policing this problem. All credit should go them to them for operating the hotline, but it seems that the problem is not going away. In fact it's getting worse.
"The authorities need to take a tough line with anybody caught in possession of such material. Maximum sentences should be handed down to anybody convicted."