Female TD's break silence on harassment

I don't agree. If you're a politician at the moment you can't just not be on social media and some of the campaigns that have been orchestrated against various people who've really no controversial public persona at all and they've have been really bizarre stuff.

We also seem to have moved into a realm of attacking the player and not the ball, which is very much something that's coming from US social media. When someone doesn't like a particular policy, instead of campaigning against the policy, or even protesting about that policy, they go after a political figure instead.

Then you've this anti-politics thing which is like "Ah they're all the same..." or these paranoid loons out there who keep using phrases like "the MSM" and think the whole world is a conspiracy theory.

We're moving into a rather strange era with social media driving very odd social phenomena.

Ireland also has a very genuinely, open democracy, with extremely easy access to representatives, and also because of PR-STV voting, we've lots of different parties represented and also a very low bar to actually standing. This isn't the US, the UK or France where you'll be stuck with one Tory/GOP/REM or whatever MP representing an entire area due to majoritarian electoral systems, you've a whole spectrum there.

It's also not just politicians, you'd horrendous harassment of various female media people in recent years and I'm aware of similar incidents going way back, and you also have just the usual random stalker / harassment scenarios that were targeting people who weren't in the public spotlight at all.

We have weak anti-stalker laws, where trying to get Gardai to intervene is often extremely difficult which does not help the situation. In the cases I'm aware of, the response was very much hand wringing or an assumption that someone's exhadurating and then all of a sudden it blows up when the stalker turns up at someone's home or workplace, or causes some physical damage to property or similar.

If we don't tackle some of these issues, we are going to just see worse and worse problems developing and it's a particular issue for people with any kind of public profile involved in politics, journalism and so on who make strong statements because of the nature of what they do.

We also have a serious, serious issue with lunatics online targeting ethnic minorities. If you look at that couple who had to literally leave the country because of harassment after they appeared in a supermarket advert. You have to ask what the hell is going on when something like that happens. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/co-meath-couple-lay-low-due-to-racist-abuse-after-lidl-advert-1.4041975

We have major problems brewing if we don't tackle some of this and I think we are tending to just go: 'la la la la - everything's fine! Doesn't happen here! Don't burst my bubble!'