Independent TD Michael Healy-Rae has denounced “outrageous” and “hurtful” online abuse and called for action against social media platforms.
The Kerry TD said abuse against him “won’t bother me”. He said he did not like his family or friends being abused but what “pushed it over the line” was abuse of his mother.
“My late mother died in 2015 and she was a highly respectable woman,” he said during Leaders’ Questions on Tuesday.
“She could speak seven languages. She never said anything bad about any human being. She supported all of us in every way she possibly could. And she was a nice lady.
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“And when I saw one night her image being used in a derogatory way and in a political way, that pushed it over the line for me.”
The Kerry TD said he had once mistakenly described those making such comments as “keyboard warriors”. But they are “cowards, hiding behind this dirty, rotten thing thinking they can say whatever they like to the nation”.
People have had “horrible things said about them every day. And that’s supposed to be socially acceptable.”
He said a person will “put this godforsaken stupid thing in front of them” as he held up his mobile phone, “and go online and say whatever they are like that, then you’ll have thousands of people coming along and as good as swallowing it up and believing it”.
He said he was against the Hate Speech Bill and “would never support it. But I am against people telling barefaced lies.” He added that newspapers and producers of television programmes “are held to account” to be truthful and there are legal implications.
“Why are we allowing a situation where the social media companies can broadcast whatever and there’s no repercussions? That’s wrong.”
He asked the Taoiseach “will you please try to do something to bring a bit of normality into the situation so that people can’t be telling lies, blatant lies”.
Mr Harris described the abuse of Mr Healy Rae’s mother as “despicable, reprehensible”.
There were “really serious issues around vile, vile online abuse” with people being targeted by “faceless online users, who seek to intimidate people, silence people, stop you saying something, get inside your mind, knock you off your stride”.
The Taoiseach added that robust political debate and TDs going “hammer and tongs” in the Dáil is “very different to the hate, the nasty and the negative comments online”.
He added that “it cannot be the wild west” as he pointed to the establishment of the media regulator, Coimisiún na Meáin, and a “new online safety framework to hold platforms to account and to ensure that we significantly reduce harmful content online”.
A draft online safety code will be adopted formally later this year. “It’s designed to work with other laws to ensure the platform supervision and enforcement of regulations is delivered effectively,” the Taoiseach said.
Failure to comply with the code “can lead to very significant financial sanctions of up to €20 million or 10 per cent of turnover, and continued noncompliance can lead to criminal sanctions for company directors”.
Earlier Independent TD Matt Shanahan said he heard politicians “decrying hate speech and the coarsening of political life, wondering, gormlessly, where all this anger is coming from” but he said they did not consider their own part “whipping it up” by ignoring development in parts of the country.
The Taoiseach described his comments as “fundamentally out of order” because there is “never a justification for the hatred some members of this House have experienced or for the intimidation and attacks they have experienced, online, offline, at their homes and towards their families. I would not wish it on my worst enemy,” he said.
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