Complaints to an Irish watchdog about Internet child pornography have more than doubled, a report from an ISP group, cited by AFP, said.
The AFP report quoted Children's Minister Brian Lenihan as saying that some of the images were "truly horrendous" while presenting the report of the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland (ISPAI) hotline.
Hotline.ie was set up in 1999 by the government and the ISPs to tackle illegal child pornography being distributed online, the report said.
The hotline said it had received 5,102 complaints in the 30 months to last December, up from 1,792 in the two years to 2003.
Lenihan said the amount of serious child abuse images being reported had grown year on year, the AFP report said.
The hotline.ie report said that there had also been an increase in the severity of openly available illegal child pornography, with 60% of the material falling under the category of child rape.
The AFP report said the hotline reported the Web sites involved to Irish police for forwarding to the Interpol. It recommended that parents use filtering software on home computers to protect children.