The fact that this article talks about passports is a hint that it is at least partly misreporting based on assumptions from someone who didn't know much about the situation.
This is within the EU, so obviously what would be asked is an EU id.
There isn't one. Ireland also doesn't have a national ID program, so effectively for most people their passport or driver's license are the only forms of government ID they _might_ have. But even then it's not mandatory to have either.
"EU id" was a shortcut for "id documents issued by EU countries", they're valid EU-wide. It's an ID card in most EU countries and that's what would be used for the purposes of this article, except for Irish citizens I guess but they are probably a relatively small percentage of EU visitors of porn sites.
Now I just noticed that although the subject is "most of the EU", this is an Irish site, so maybe they just didn't really take this into account.
Beware: you run risk of inadvertently downloading or distributing child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
A friend was talking about how their US friend got given a sex offence label due to downloading a zip of porn that unknown to them contained some CSAM. Lost their job and worse.
You didn't know is no defence in some jurisdictions. You personally can't check images or image collections for legality, so the risk is real.
Well, opening a website can save in the browser cache any image which is not displayed on the website. What all these silly mobile apps and games exactly are downloading and uploading? Who knows....
Progress: jail for everyone. Certainly modern life has dangerous tripwires. I just had to google the words for the acronym CSAM - and as a non-citizen it made me double-think about surveillance.
Maybe add a couple more paras to your comment?
If you give me six sentences written by the most innocent of men, I will find something in them with which to hang them.
- powerful political figure (1585 – 1642)