Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have reservations about some aspects of the Bill. How Covid played out in the media was an enlightening and salutary experience for me. It was a strange thing to see what happened to medical doctors and people who head research centres in universities. I am thinking in particular of Professor Carl Heneghan, a British academic. Some of what he said was being flagged on Facebook as unorthodox, untrusted and not to be accepted because somebody somewhere determined it was not in accordance with the prevailing orthodoxy. It may well be that what he had to say did not accord with the orthodoxy but that tendency is frightening. I wonder how much expertise the person who determined his posts were somehow dangerous had in evidence-based medicine, which was Professor Heneghan’s field.

This labelling of stuff made be uncomfortable. Surely everything you hear or read is to be taken with a grain of salt. Even among medical professionals, there is a reason people sometimes get a second opinion. It is not to say the person who gave the first opinion lacked bona fides but opinions differ. Is it not the nature of life and discourse that opinions differ? We seem to be obsessed with the idea there is one truth we all have to share and if we do not share it society will fall apart, so we need to banish those who do not share our views and have improper thoughts. It goes back to a darker time in Irish and world history. It seems to me that is where we are going.

There were fact-checkers. One outlet in Ireland was obsessed with fact-checking and setting the fact-checkers on people. It was a media outlet supported almost exclusively by Government funding at the time. A Government official could contact it. If somebody disputed anything a Government official said, the outlet could be contacted and would do its fact-checking. It became a real witch-hunt. Witch-hunts are fine. Everyone is free to become a witch if they want to and we all have our views on hunting but when it is State-sponsored and carried out by an outlet paid by the State to enforce a message the State wants people to accept without question, then it becomes a source of worry, to me at least.

That is a worry I have about this Bill. There is a vetting of researchers provision which seems a strange delegation of powers. There is an accredited fact-checkers provision, also in section 37. Are we now to have vigilante groups policing the Internet and accorded a special badge by Coimisiún na Meán? That is a dystopian way of looking at it but I fear that is the road we are going down. It started during Covid with flagging content, including that of eminent professors who did not fully accept what other eminent professors or, more important, Ministers for health were saying. I am not talking about an Irish context; this is beyond Ireland and in a much bigger context. Those people were suddenly pushed to the margins and distrusted. That is worrying.

Equally, at the start of the Ukraine war there was one narrative only and you had to buy into it. We could not afford the narrative, it now looks like from what the Government is doing. We will differentiate between those who fled Ukraine and gained temporary protection at one time and those who come now and have temporary protection. It seems rather odd, philosophically, but I am sure the Government will explain it in due course. Close to the start of the Ukraine war, the European Commission, led by a former German Minister for defence, no less, announced certain outlets were to be banned. RT, formerly Russia Today, was banned. It did not affect my life. I have never gone to Russia Today to look for the truth on anything like that. I may have flicked through television channels in a hotel and seen Russia Today in that context but I would not go there to discern the truth. I am not sure I would go to any particular media outlet to discern the truth. You inform yourself from a variety of sources and make up your mind, do you not? Russia Today being banned by a former German defence Minister made me uncomfortable. A German defence Minister deciding what I could and could not view on my television is not a society in which I want to live. I am not saying I want to look at Russia Today. I could not care less whether it is there or gone, but the fact she is telling me what I can and cannot look at is worrying. It is moving us in a particular direction, which is farther from a plurality of views and opinions and towards the idea of one universal truth we must all accept, marching together towards this common nirvana that awaits us all.

That is worrying, so I would have a lot of reservations about this Bill. I accept that is based on EU legislation, but the fact it is based on EU legislation does not give me much consolation, given the make-up of the current Commission, its political impetus, and the complete lack of transparency in some of the decision-making processes there. Then there is the fact that she was so willing to essentially hide communications with various companies from people who wanted to investigate it, when there was a legitimate issue in determining it.

Finally, and it is a lot closer to home, there was this schemozzle between the Department of Justice and X. Which of them do we believe? The Minister came out and announced something and X said that it was untrue. Somebody somewhere made a mistake. It may be down to human error but is the Minister for Justice to be flagged as somebody whose pronouncements are not to be trusted on social media? I do not think she should be, for what it is worth. Nevertheless, she has not withdrawn the accusation that she made. There is a suggestion somewhere that some people have preferred routes to contacting social media companies. A former local politician in Ireland announced on television that she had got on to someone she knew in Twitter and they had dealt with something for her. Again, are we to have a preferred grouping of people who police what is said on behalf of the rest of us? These are all potentially dark avenues we can go down.

We need to be very careful about this Bill. It is, fundamentally, about censorship, and of course censorship is fine when all we are saying is that you cannot say something that is untrue. However, saying that the Earth orbited the Sun was a very dangerous thing to say at one point, and we should not ever go back to a time when people are penalised or distrusted for saying things like that, or anything, arguably.

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