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“We live in a racist society,” Social Democrats TD Sinéad Gibney has said.
Speaking on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics over the weekend, the Dublin Rathdown TD, who is her party’s communications spokesperson, argued that Ireland must acknowledge the existence of racism and invest more heavily in tackling it.
Gibney made the remarks during a discussion on recent disorder in Northern Ireland, which she described as “racist riots”, and broader issues surrounding social media regulation, migration, and race relations.
Discussing racism in Ireland, Gibney said the country needed to take a more proactive approach.
“Well, racism is is something that we do need to tackle in society in a proactive way,” she said.
“I think often people think about being anti-racist as resisting racism essentially and not tolerating it, but I would argue that actually it’s a much more proactive commitment to be an anti-racist society.
“And I mean we’ve seen, you know, a huge reaction to death recently here in Dublin – Yves Sakila and the concerns from Black and Irish. Like we live in a racist society, we have to name that and we have to deal with it.”
She went on to argue that Ireland had failed to adequately address the issue in recent years.
“Ireland has not done well in this,” Gibney continued.
“Like we had to bring back into action our National Action Plan against Racism, which had been dormant for 12 years and it was only because of EU pressure that we had to bring that back into action.
“We have now appointed a race rapporteur. But we need to see much more investment in actually tackling racism within society, and to couple that with then the tech regulation that I mentioned, and political leadership.”
The Social Democrats TD also criticised government messaging around migration and housing.
“But political leaders here need to be very, very careful,” she said.
“And I would argue that the government on a regular basis scapegoat migrants for their own failures. They will say in debates about housing where nobody yet has mentioned migrants, they will start saying that because of the pressures of migrant numbers, that we have housing issues.”
Much of Gibney’s contribution focused on the regulation of social media platforms.
Gibney said social media companies were profiting from societal divisions and argued that stronger regulation was needed, adding: “We need to tackle that and I think the EU presidency is an opportune time to do that.”
Gibney said the current discussion around artificial intelligence was too heavily focused on competitiveness and enterprise, and not sufficiently focused on governance and regulation.
She proposed a number of measures aimed at changing how social media platforms operate.
“Because if we turn off toxic algorithms by default, if we turn them off for children, if we start to look towards categorising platforms as publishers, there won’t be the ability to foment society,” she said.
“At the moment, what’s happening is that these tech companies are actually making money out of polarisation, out of radicalisation.”
The remarks come several months after Gibney made separate comments about the role that social media algorithms could play in shaping online discourse.
As reported by Gript in January, Gibney told an Oireachtas committee meeting that she believed publicly controlled online platforms could use algorithms to promote objectives deemed to be in the public interest.
Speaking during the meeting, she said it would be a “low ambition” simply to switch off recommender algorithms and suggested they could instead be used to advance broader societal goals and promote “whatever we choose”.
“If we had an ability to exert public interest on those algorithms, we could flip the entire online space on its head,” Gibney said at the time.
The comments were made during discussions on online safety and regulation at the Oireachtas committee, of which Gibney is a member.
The Government is due to assume the rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union next year, a role which allows member states to help shape and advance legislative priorities across the bloc.
Social media regulation, online safety, artificial intelligence, and implementation of the EU’s Digital Services Act have all become increasingly prominent policy issues at both Irish and European level in recent years.
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