Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Please do.

We could not get them off the radio and the television. They were the darlings of the media but it was a case of empty vessels. There was nothing behind it and they have been found out now. It is banana skins and no policies, just diktats from Belfast. I always listen to Deputy Howlin. I respect his long service and his always very well thought-out words but certainly on the 1989 Act, he himself has expressed concerns that it is not amalgamated into this new proposed legislation to stop confusion. I was not here in 1989 or a long time after it but the 1989 Act is there and it will be confusing. It is confusing. I did not hear the Minister saying anything, even though Deputy Howlin was delighted with all the lovely words said. Words are great but people in Ireland - our own people, and I am not anti anybody - are afraid of their lives in their homes day in, day out. If the Minister spent a little more time being concerned about them, having the rule of law and a Commissioner the gardaí can support, we might see some hope at the end of the line. This is a vanity project. Of course it is. It is half-baked now. I commend the esteemed Senators who threw out the threads because when the Bill came to this House on Second Stage, as Deputy Tóibín said, there was nobody to speak against it, only himself and myself. All the Sinn Féin Deputies that day spoke glowingly about how the Bill was ten years too late and how it was welcome. However, now they get the backlash from the people they have flip-flopped again. They have more flip-flops done than Ryan Tubridy had in RTÉ for the show. Flip-flopping all the way, they keep flip-flopping until they find out. The Minister is also neglecting people. I put a question to her earlier and she did not even respond to it. There is nothing to stop somebody on a mission to destroy somebody's reputation from using artificial intelligence to clone a person's voice and use it to create a 100% convincing audio file that would easily fall under this proposed hate speech legislation. They could post it onto social media, have the person arrested, charged and convicted of hate speech crime, perhaps jailed depending on what was said on the cloned audio file. The Minister ignored my request. These are not my concerns.

See this speech in context