I'll be appearing in front of the Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Home Affairs and Migration later today to discuss Irish transposition of the NIS2 Directive; @ciananbrennan.bsky.social has a preview of the issues in the @irishexaminer.bsky.social.

Why don’t people fret about Swiss independence like they do Ireland? #rhetorical

“Rather than address the real root causes of political dissatisfaction in Ireland, it suits the Government to point to asylum seekers as the problem – something the far right is happy to capitalise on.”

We’re watching a shift where AI simulates the cohesion and reinforcement that used to require an entire online community. A single person can now build a complete parallel reality with nothing more than a prompt window. Which seems bad.

LLMs give people with delusional belief systems a way to organise those beliefs. The model fills in gaps, supplies connective tissue, and wraps the madness in formal language. It doesn't make the claims more credible to us, it just tidies them up.

Yeah, you do suddenly realize that your Gmail (or whatever you use as your main personal email) basically contains your entire life and must be protected at all costs

Someone is trying to reset my password on almost every account I have.

Wasn’t a massive housing plan, much delayed and months in the making, just announced the other day? And now we return to the usual ad hoc stuff. www.rte.ie/news/politic...

This guy asked this question in 2016 and was literally never heard from again.

she was doing okay for a while there and then 😵‍💫

Someone’s blue pilling MAGA!

According to Fox News, if you are a racist Young Republican you are still a "kid" when you are 34, but if you are an Epstein victim, you are an adult when you're 15.

THEN YOU PURCHASE THEM AND DO NOT USE THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS

It would be one thing having a "debate" on immigration if people meant they wanted a "debate" based on facts. But what most people seem to mean when they say they want a debate is that is they want us to pretend a bunch of entirely made up bullshit is true.

If Trump suggested such a thing, notwithstanding that it is a domestic measure of no relevance to us, we’d be hearing about it regularly. But when such a proposal is made here?

The Government's new stated aim is to make it so unattractive for lawyers to take good cases against the State that they will stop. Not bad cases. Good ones. Successful ones. This new rule only applies if you *win* your case. Doesn't that worry anyone slightly? m.independent.ie/irish-news/o...

Costs against a *successful* party?

Sorry, but Enoch Burke is an unwitting and unwilling comedy gift. You can’t tweet breaking news about yourself and report you are excellent as part of it. It’s gold!

When is a Guarantee not a guarantee?

The world’s first trillionaire initiated a move that has left more than half a million people dead, most of whom are children.

Ireland, for different reasons, doesn’t look at the EU this way either.

Amazing. What could go wrong. The business geniuses have done it again.

Enough of the think pieces - it’s quite clear what the government parties are up to

Fintan O’Toole: Simon Harris is deliberately spreading disinformation on immigration

One wonders how many new builds he has been in.

The idea that Ireland has ever "gold plated" the transposition of EU Environmental law, is causing a lot of people in my world to chortle manically.

Wow the IT actually printed my letter #speirghorm

Great thread. I heard earlier this week that about 0.2% of planning applications are caught up by judicial review, which seems like a fairly reasonable number that can't really explain the housing crisis after all... ?

“what is a republic worth if the nurse can’t afford rent?””

Furthermore public transit teaches you how to live with temporary minor annoyances and cars teach you that you're god's most special baby and your moment-to-moment comfort is the only important thing in the world

The doings and transprirings of the "Royal" families of more backward nations are of no consequence to us citizens of free republics

Hahah I saw everyone getting excited about this weird robot and lo and behold it is both not as impressive as first thought and also a further massive invasion of domestic privacy for no real reason.

We keep hearing that our shared reality is at risk from social media, online disinformation etc, and while that's true, some newspaper people columnists have been shaping their own reality for a long time. Too much of what's in Irish newspaper columnists wouldn't even survive basic fact checking.

Nothing I've seen has made an at all compelling case for why it's some kind of crisis that a woman with no government experience who showed up all of 5 minuted before the deadline failed to make the ballot

Catherine Connolly got more votes than any other president in the history of the state. This kind of analysis is neither serious nor credible, and it has to stop. #Aras25

Anyway, Gareth Sheridan (remember him? Pharma Bro?) was on RTÉ yesterday and complained that he received a lot of hate online. He then was uninterrupted while he said that you should need a government ID to use social media (because someone might be mean to a failed presidential candidate).

“[T]he elevated level of spoiled votes is an invitation for Ireland's Greatest Losers to claim that, actually, every spoiled vote is a vote for whatever voter-repellent position they want to push.”

This article is full of digs against horseshoe bats, planners & says “environmental goals have created stasis”. The @dublininquirer.com have already looked into the Collison backed Progress Ireland & identified links with US libertarian & Peter Thiel backed groups. We need independent journalism!

Recent Aras elections saw multiple candidates get through process via Oireachtas or local authority support - 1997 had 5 candidates, 2011 had 7 and 2018 had 6. There is no need to change the system because the 2025 motley crew were late to process, poor quality or not serious about running at all.

Something I didn’t see remarked on about the attack on Connolly for representing banks was that she spoke against their interests as a politician. If she spoke in favour of their interests it could be different.

tl;dr? Right wing head bangers. #soilthevote www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

Am I right in thinking it isn’t a historically low turnout? That the share of first preference will exceed MDH? And the scale of victory is comprehensive? The commentariat must be in meltdown. For a low-stakes election it’s remarkable how they have demonstrated themselves to be so out of touch.

Declan Ganley keeps getting airtime despite his many failures, his history of losing.

These are the people we're being lectured about "excluding"

Hearing reports of people spoiling their ballots by writing 800-word op-ed columns about how Ireland needs to have a grown-up debate about joining NATO

Let’s see if any analysis today deals with how we counter hate and the message Connolly campaign sent rather than finding a home for it in govt policy to appease spoiled votes.

Vote soilers are a broad bunch, remember.

There will be a lot of nonsense analysis on the turnout and spoiled votes (which can’t really be analysed) but the truth is that on results like these if the second place candidate got *all* the Gavin transfers and the spoiled votes she still wouldn’t win.