Senator John McGahon- speech from 22 Jun 2021

Thanks very much Cairlock. Leader, in my first week of university, nearly 10, 11 years ago, one of the first books I read was John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and John Stuart Mill was a Liberal MP and a Victorian political thinker, and the main premises of his argument was that he who knows only of his own side knows little of that, and his main point was that in order for your argument to have any sort of validity, it has to be tested in the court of public opinion against someone else's argument, and that is the only way that you can be certain that your argument is either correct or right. when you hear the other side, and that brings it now when we take it into the modern day era, and the problem we have is that we have online where the spread of disinformation, the spread of conspiracy theories, the spread of people retreating into echo chambers where they only hear people who agree with them, and I want to really pay tribute to Finland, and the work that the Finnish Department of Education are trying to do here, and what they have done, and it's extremely interesting, in 2014, the Russian government tried to attack Finland when with advertising to try and destabilise it a little bit, and they did this through Facebook and other types of sites, and as a result, the Finnish government introduced classes for primary school children about critical thinking, about how they can identify misinformation online, about how they can identify disinformation online, and to be critical thinkers about it, and I think it is really visionary that Finland were doing this as a result in 2014, and it was a wonderful idea to look at the concept here in Ireland, so I would really appreciate a debate about what the Department of Education tends to do in terms of educating primary school children and secondary school children, about trying to identify and to manage misinformation online, to realise for what it is, and to be more critical thinkers. Thank you.