A Green Party councillor has apologised for a tweet about the Roger Casement statue in Dún Laoghaire.
On Wednesday Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown councillor Oisín O’Connor tweeted a picture of the pier at Dún Laoghaire’s reopened baths with a photograph of the Casement statue in the background.
In a series of tweets, he said: “You’ve heard of elf on the shelf, but have you of ... I’ve no doubt Roger would be delighted with his new colloquial name ... rhymes with near.”
Cllr O’Connor, who was co-opted on to the council in December 2020 and who has both the rainbow and the transgender flag in his Twitter profile, has since deleted the tweet.
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He tweeted on Saturday: “I am sorry for the stupid tweet I put out the other day, alluding to a word that gets used to hurt people. It hurt people I would never want to hurt. Thanks to people who reached out to me privately and who patiently helped me understand my stupid mistake.
“My intent was to recognise that there’s a big new prominent statue of an LGBTQ historical figure. That doesn’t diminish how wrong I was, and I’m not excusing. Just explaining because I’ve understandably been asked ‘why?’ by people.”
