Ms Niamh N? Chonchubhair:

I agree with the Deputy that a face-to-face approach can be key. One example is The Star Project Ballymun easy street outreach team that supports young people in the community and meets them where they are at. Its members have been going out chatting to people they meet and doing some of that. They hold space to counter this narrative but that places the burden, for example the fact-checking burden, on a community resource that is already quite stretched. It is heartening to hear that TikTok has at least acknowledged the issue. One of the problems I have perceived is that much of this discussion is about online media. There is a generational divide in who is communicating on TikTok, via Insta stories, Signal and other platforms. We asked people to stay at home for two years, so their way of communicating with themselves, never mind one another, has shifted into a device and we are now not trying to meet them where they are at in this divide. The person-to-person approach is burdensome. One hotel in Ballymun had been housing local families a few years ago. Those families were moved to hubs and through the transition of time, the hotel became a Covid-19 quarantine hotel, which was a business decision for the hotel. There are no structures to support community organisations to even getting the fact-checked timeline to confirm that a local family was not booted out to welcome another individual. They are doing it because it is necessary. The parallel approach needs to be brought closer together.