Mr. Micheál Anglim:

I thank the committee for inviting us today. As chairperson of LAMA, it is a great honour to sit in the Seanad Chamber. I will not go back over what other colleagues have spoken about. I will be fairly brief but I will say a few words on the issue of candidate and councillor safety. In the election just gone by we found with some candidates who were running, and I will speak about my own area in particular, and there is a phrase - "keyboard warriors" - and you could nearly go so far as to call them "TikTok warriors" now as well, that there was a willingness to throw good people under the bus for no reason at all. It is sad to see the level of respect in councillors, candidates and elections that was there in my father's time, God rest him, and in Councillor Terry Shannon's and Councillor John Sheahan's times, who are in this game for longer than I am, has waned to the extent it has. You respect people and maybe society as a whole seems to be going in a bad way. Whatever can be done should be done to try to bring us back onto the straight and narrow. Some candidates had to put up with atrocious things being said about them due to being from ethnic minorities or to their gender, not just by keyboard warriors but by actual candidates. That is plain wrong. I will leave my contribution at that.