Gráinne Seoige said she has received hundreds of messages from teenage girls, their parents and women who have been victims of online sexual abuse since she spoke of her own ordeal last week.
The former television presenter and Fianna Fáil general election candidate said many of the messages would move anyone to tears.
“I heard about a girl yesterday, 14 years old, who shared a photo with her boyfriend who shared it with a group,” she said. “That girl has attempted suicide not once but twice.”
Ms Seoige was addressing the Oireachtas media committee on the harm caused by AI tools and social media used to create sexual images of women and girls and share them online.
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She spoke on RTÉ’s Prime Time programme last week of how an image of her was manipulated and spread online during her general election campaign in 2024.
Ms Seoige told the committee she followed every procedure recommended to try to get the image removed, reporting it to the online platform and the Garda, but she hit a dead-end.
“I had to find someone who had the image and ask them where they got it and then go to that person and ask them,” she said, criticising a system where the burden of tackling the abuse was placed on the victim.
Her case came to a halt when gardaí were unable to convince a holder of the image to reveal where it came from or where he had sent it.
The only option presented was to attempt to get court orders for every phone suspected of containing the image.
Privacy for the abuser trumped protection for the victim, she said.
Almost every victim and parent who contacted her in the past week had similar experiences where they tried every avenue to stop the spread of the images but hit a wall.
Ms Seoige said she was constantly retraumatised by the experience.
“Every man you meet you wonder, have you seen this image of me? I shopped for months after this with a surgical mask. You’re so afraid to be seen in public you make yourself small and unseen.”
She said the law was not fit for purpose, adding that legislators should change it immediately and be prepared to revise it repeatedly as technologies developed.
“The way I would put it is, the crime is in a Formula One car and we are chasing after it on a tricycle,” she said.
She said while much attention had been on the AI tools used to create sexually abusive images, sharing platforms, such as WhatsApp and Meta, also needed to be tackled.
“If Grok are the nuclear warhead, then WhatsApp is the Enola Gay that transports and drops the bomb.”
She acknowledged that the image of her is “probably flying around at twice the speed it was in the past year because people are now looking for it because I’m speaking about it”.
She pointed out that the Digital Services Act provided for specific protections for politicians and electoral candidates but it helped her in no way.
If a woman approached her now and asked whether she should run for public office, she would tell her not to.
Ms Seoige said Australia had law that ensured a victim could ring a hotline to report an image and it had to be taken down within 24 hours.
She did not see why this model could not be replicated in Ireland but felt that there was some reluctance to tackle the big online platforms because they provided jobs and tax revenues.
“We need teeth,” she said. “This is not just me, one person – it’s happening to women and children all over the country.”
