Parents and employers can put a stop to their children or workers accessing pornographic material on the Internet. They can also put a block on pornographic e-mails.
The steps that can be taken involve the installation of filtering software, which in some instances is available free.
The main filtering programs are Net Nanny and Cyber Patrol, which have been adopted for homes or offices.
Net Nanny comes preloaded with a list of websites with sexually explicit material. These sites cannot be accessed on a computer which has the software installed.
Cyber Patrol filters by categorising websites into lists, and allowing the person installing it to choose the categories they wish to filter out.
The chairman of the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland (ISPAI), Mr Cormac Callanan, said that while there were products that would block access to e-mails based on certain criteria including pornographic content, e-mails were more difficult to control than websites.
"Internet service providers have been lobbying the Government to try and ban unsolicited e-mail but the Government doesn't agree that we should," he said.
The ISPAI has a hotline to which the existence of Internet pornographic material can be reported. It received 671 reports between November 1999 and June 2001 but under five resulted in the Garda being called in. The hotline can be reached at www.hotline.ie
The chief executive officer of the Irish Internet Association, Mr Colm Reilly, said his advice to parents who wish to shield their children from pornography was to supervise access. He also recommended that families consider installing software applications to filter out unwanted material.
The advice from the Garda to consumers concerned about pornographic e-mails is to contact their service provider.
A spokeswoman for Eircom recommended that people install filtering software and report undesirable material to the ISPAI hotline.