Ms Catherine Gallagher:

I will focus on what Senator Garvey was saying on what we would call the human interest-framed stories. This is something that ties in with my own academic background research. While I am a disabled person, my background is in journalism and political communication, which I have been able to bring into my voluntary work. To remind people, I am not a staff member. I am a volunteer activist who has other commitments on top of what I do in my spare time.

On the human interest stories and how often disabled people or autistic people are framed in the media, there has been a trajectory of human interest stories and emotively framed stories. As it happens, recently I published an open-source academic article. While it is not particularly relevant to what Senator Garvey is asking about, it is entitled, "How 'cocooning' as a public health measure was reported during the Covid-19 crisis" in Ireland throughout 2020. While I accept it is a niche study, I found some interesting trends, some of which were not surprising to me, in that cocooning, let us say, as a public health measure, was very much reported on as a human interest emotive feature. Of the sample of coverage that I analysed, I found that there was four times the number of human interest-framed stories than reports that I deemed to be particularly informative. Consequently, we have a trajectory of people feeling that they needed to share their private lives, as I did last year in relation PhD scholarships, to bring about some kind of awareness. It is not a sustainable model of advocacy, both in my personal and academic opinion.

It is not that I want to vilify newsmakers either but there is also research which was conducted in Ireland recently that shows that newsmakers, a term which includes editors, journalists and news executives, know that interviewing an autistic person, a parent of an autistic child or a disabled person and constructing a story like that is the type of story that is low in cost. Getting someone to tell his or her story is a low-resource form of reporting and typically gets engagement because it invokes a sense of emotion. While personal stories are important, I would be curious, perhaps after my current research project, and interested in a subject I invite others to consider, namely, the effects of private citizens sharing their personal stories in the media. Research shows that when people share their personal stories in the media, it contributes to action by Government. In terms of the audiences who engage with those stories, research proves that it shifts attitudes from an individual issue to a wider social, political or cultural issue. It can be effective but at what cost?

Bringing it back to my opening statement on people having the right to live with privacy, dignity and discretion, for disabled people, and possibly for autistic people - I might ask Mr. Harris to chip in on that - that is a privilege I have not enjoyed, even before the PhD issue that I had.

Lastly, while joint committees obviously cannot influence how journalists and section editors do their jobs, the media is so important because we get mediated messages through the media. That is how we know what was happening in the budget this week. It is where we got our information on anything to do with Covid over the past couple of years. While the sample of coverage in my research was not deemed to be particular informative in terms of information-rich reporting on cocooning, I would welcome people taking a read of that article. It is publicly available.

It is worth considering Government communication strategies because journalists and media people such as me can only work on what is available. If certain Departments or Ministers are not prioritised behind the scenes in the Government communications strategy on any given issue, they will not have the platform to be able to come out to speak on these platforms. That is why political communication is important. It includes the media sphere, the political sphere and also us as a public.

Sorry, I meant to keep it briefer than that but it is something I am particularly interested in. We need to consider the harm caused by private people, who have other things to do in their days and weeks, and lives, coming out. I do not believe it is sustainable, although I understand why it happens. I understand why people feel they need to come out because I myself have had to do it. I understand why it happens, but maybe another committee meeting might consider how we raise issues, particularly, maybe, for people who are not involved in, aware of or a member of DPOs.