Mr. Gary Daly:

I think that is a great idea. I had not heard about it and I do not know if anybody else had. I would have an awful lot of ideas for who should come in on that. Obviously as a number of us have mentioned here, politicians of all sides of the House should be on it. Some politicians have been very good on this but some really have not shown any leadership at all. We just mentioned that the media have a really important role. Mr. Malone and Ms McDonald have talked at length about social media and they are very well placed to talk about that. Television, radio and print media have a very important role to play as well. Even the use of clickbait headlines in respect of refugees is an issue. I regularly have people who only read a clickbait headline ringing me and saying this is terrible, based on whatever the headline said. I ask them if they actually read the article because the clickbait headline will be completely different from the content of the article itself. Generally when journalists are approached on Twitter, they invariably say they did not write the headline. It is the organisation that seems to be using these headlines that are geared towards driving as much traffic as possible to their own sites. It is really unfortunate.

There is also a long-standing issue in Ireland, since before this issue arose, particularly on TV and radio, of having somebody on both sides of a debate regardless. The vast majority of the population might be in favour of one side of the debate but they will insist on platforming both sides. The person they pick on the other side of the debate can be really uninformed or can be pushing deliberately misinformed propaganda. The media have a very important role but have been really reckless. If we look at our neighbours across the water, the British tabloid media are appalling. It seems that we are heading down that road. The Government has a role to play. We have a media watchdog here. If it was given more teeth, that would be important.