Lynn Ruane
University of Dublin · Independent · Ireland
“The chairperson of the board of the Courts Service, Ms Justice Aileen Donnelly, said that the rise in drugs cases of a less serious kind had increased the workload of the lower courts.”
“I remember I could barely write when I started studying addiction. I was 16 when I applied for an addiction studies course. They would not let me on it because they said I was too young and it was for adults. I fought and fought. I did not know how to write an essay. I had not engaged in school since I was about 12.”
“The world is watching how Ireland has done the most extensive interrogation of drugs policy ever seen, and is waiting in hope to see what we do next to make sure that we move with the evidence. It is not just opinion.”
“I join Senator McDowell in thanking all the people we should thank for the efficient and smooth running of these Houses. He ran through them all. Even if we have had a few ding-dongs over rulings on amendments and stuff, other than that, things have moved well, as they always do. I thank the staff across both Houses.”
“There are not many things I will claim some level of expertise in, but this is one where I will claim it. I have been obsessed with it since I was about 16. I look forward to coming back in the new year, and not just for 90 minutes. We need a substantial time to discuss this report, whether three hours, four hours or six hours.”
“It will contain all incidents of prohibited AI practices under Article 5 of the AI Act; all serious incidents of high-risk AI systems in the State, reported under Article 73; high-risk AI systems that are employed in critical infrastructure; and any other AI-related incidents or notifications in the State required to be reported under the…”
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“It states: It is in the interests of both Member States and applicants that applicants receive at a very early stage comprehensive information on the procedure to be followed and on their rights and obligations. In addition, it is essential to ensure a correct recognition of international protection needs already at the [early] stage of the administrative procedure by providing good quality information and legal support which leads to more efficient and better quality decision-making. For that purpose, access to legal counselling, assistance and representation should be an integral part of the common procedure for international protection. In this instance, the State is choosing not to do this, thereby creating risk for vulnerable applicants and making the cost and resource of intensive litigation inevitable.”
“Crucially, however, it leaves out a provision for the exercise of State discretion under Recital 16 in the APR, which states: It should also be possible for Member States to provide for free legal assistance and representation during the administrative procedure in accordance with national law. There is nothing under the pact to stop the State from continuing to provide legal advice and assistance with regard to administrative procedures in the first instance - at the beginning stage - but it does not do so at present. Without provision for legal aid to allow people to get legal advice and assistance at the first stage, international protection applicants will not be properly advised going into the system at the outset. Recital 16 encourages member states to provide legal advice and assistance at all stages of the process.”
“Subparagraph (vi) proposes that legal counsellors should provide international protection applicants, including people with special reception needs such as disabled people, children and victims of trafficking, with information about how to fill out a template which may well result in them being transferred to another EU member state. It does not seem appropriate that legal counselling should deal with something of such significant consequence to international protection applicants, particularly people with special reception needs. The Bill provides for legal counsel on request, as required by Article 16 of the asylum procedures regulation, APR.”
“This can have serious and significant consequences for a person, especially a person with special reception needs who is being transferred to another EU member state. Such a person obviously would require legal advice and not legal counsel. Subparagraph (vi) in amendment No. 14 relates to take-back requests. If the State believes that another EU member state should process an applicant's application for international protection, it can ask the relevant member state to take back the person under what is commonly referred to as the Dublin regulation system.”
“At this important stage of a person's application process, not having the highest standard of legal advice could see the person sent to a different member state. Therefore, clarification on the reasoning is needed. We need to consider people who may have special reception needs or who may be specifically vulnerable in this regard, such as disabled persons, victims of trafficking, children and so on. Their requirements go above and beyond the requirement for legal counselling provided for in the pact. Given what is at stake, it should be done by qualified lawyers. I suggest that on Report Stage we will seek to delete subparagraph (iv), pending the Minister's contribution on this matter. I suggest that subparagraph (i) in amendment No. 14 goes beyond the provision of information and guidance and tips into a requirement for legal advice.”
“There was considerable discussion at the justice committee on what constitutes legal advice versus legal counsel. The definition proposed by the Minister in amendment No. 14 see here today is somewhat similar to what is required under the EU pact itself. However, it has significant additional add-ons. I will make some general observations on those add-ons to the definition set out in the amendment from subparagraph (iv) onwards. It appears that this has to do with determining what member state is responsible for determining a person's IP application. Without proper legal advice at this point, a person could find themselves transferred to another member state, possibly without good and lawful reason.”
“Therefore, the legislation looks at what other protections we can put in place for 18- to 24-year-olds who want to re-engage in and contribute to society in a different way. I just wanted to give the House some positive and good news on the Bill's journey from 2018 until now. We are nearly there now. I am delighted that the Bill will pass Second Stage in the Dáil this evening.”
“The Bill will pass Second Stage tonight with the support of the Department of justice and the Minister and we will continue our conversation as to what it will look like on Committee Stage. At present, the Bill removes the cap on the number of convictions and it is actually about the distance the person has from offending, the fact that he or she is no longer offending, and kind of changing the mindset on that a little. It also looks at the cut-off point at 18 years of age. Currently, people have their records quashed at age 18 for crimes preceding that age, but we all know that nobody just becomes a responsible adult at 18. Our youth work legislation and strategies look at a young person right up to the age of 23 or 24.”
“In some instances, a person could get a number of convictions in one incident, never mind over the course of a few years, if their life is going a particular way, if they are young, if they have ended up in homelessness or for whatever reason that an accumulation of minor convictions has happened in their lives. If we have a rehabilitative system of justice in Ireland, that means punishment has to end when the person has served his or her sentence. If that person goes out into society and wants gain employment, study a certain degree or maybe get insurance to set up a business, these are all off bounds for that person as someone who has had a series of minor convictions in the past.”
“The legislation has had the support from two previous Fine Gael justice Ministers to pass through the Seanad and it now has the support of a Fianna Fáil Minister, Deputy Jim O'Callaghan, to pass through to Committee Stage in the Dáil. We do not often see the trajectory of legislation that starts here in this House and how, when we allow space and time to work together, we can see its journey through both Houses. It is such a positive step forward and we hope to see the Bill continue and be signed into law. In Ireland, a person can have only one conviction spent. Those who have more than one conviction will never have any of those convictions spent.”
“I want to put on the record today some good news for legislation that started here in the Seanad in 2018. There are two areas to which I have committed my time in politics. The first was, is and will continue to be drug decriminalisation and the other is spent convictions. In Ireland, we introduced spent convictions legislation in a rushed way because we were lagging behind other European countries in ensuring that we have legislation. The commentary at the time around spent convictions was that we knew the regime we were implementing was not correct. As such, in 2018 I tabled legislation here in the Seanad that got support from all parties and none.”
“It does not rule out the identification of people's graves. While our amendment and our Bill could have been teased out more on Committee Stage if there were concerns, let it be said here that it does not demand exhumation. It only allows a scenario where if that level of intervention is needed, it is allowed, but it does not rule out memorialisation. I want to be very careful that we will not leave this Chamber with idea that it was normal to have high infant mortality rates because those women, babies and families should never have been put there in the first place.”
“If I had a child in the ground and I could not identify where they were, try telling me that is not manifestly inappropriate. If any of the Senators here today had a Bill with a definition that said something only needs further investigation if it reaches this threshold of manifestly inappropriate, and if they had spent decades searching and asking where their child was buried and nobody could tell them where on that land that child was buried, tell me that is not manifestly inappropriate, but our legislation said it is. Our amendments only enable the Government to increase its level of investigation. It does not demand it. It does not mandate it. It opens that definition of manifestly inappropriate and then we can apply appropriate proportionality within that. It does not rule out memorialisation or investigation.”
“I wish to go back to 1888 and the rules and regulations of burial grounds in the late 1800s: A proper registry book (hereinafter referred to as the registry book), made of parchment, or vellum, or other durable material with strong bindings and suitable printed pagings, and ruled in columns with proper printed headings, shall be constantly kept in some convenient place at or near the burial ground, and shall be open for inspection at all reasonable times; but no person except the person having the care and management of the burial ground and in these rules called the registrar, shall be permitted to write in the registry book save as hereinafter mentioned. That is from the conditions on keeping records from the late 1800s.”
“We cannot reconstruct a memory and place it on something that happened in the past and say it was normal, because the records say different. That is not okay in any shape or form. In relation to private burial grounds, there have been many mentions here today of the idea there was no need to keep records of certain burial grounds.”
“The congregated settings were not normal, so the instances of high mortality can never be normal. We are only talking about events in our lifetime. We are only talking about people who are still alive today and who cannot identify the grounds in which the remains of their children lie in Bessborough, Sean Ross Abbey and many more. It is not normal. Bessborough was temporarily closed in 1946. In 1944, the Cork county manager and the South Cork Board of Public Assistance made the then Department of Local Government and Public Health aware of the high infant mortality rate in Bessborough but it chose to take no concrete steps. How was it normal if, in the forties, the county manager was saying there was something wrong here and that there was a high infant mortality rate? We cannot rewrite and reconstruct memory.”
“I thank everyone for their contributions. I will try to give responses to the different contributions of today. There are some on a language theme that I cannot help but be stirred by. We have talked about what is normal and what is not normal, and there was a suggestion that the high mortality rates were ordinary at that time in congregated settings and that they were something to be expected, accepted or understood within a particular timeframe. I want to challenge that to the highest degree. First, to go back a few steps, there were hundreds of women who had never chosen to be there. They never chose to give birth in congregated settings. They never chose to have their children taken from their arms and put in rooms with other babies to be "cared for", then put in graves.”
“They are actions grounded in dignity, truth, equality and participation in justice, and in preventing reoccurrence. This is not only about what lies beneath the soil but about what lives within us as a people. It is about whether we are prepared to make space politically, legally and socially for truth to stand in open air. It is about whether we are finally willing to inherit our past with care, courage and the justice it demands.”
“In doing so we honour not only the dead but the living who carry them in memory. Memorialisation is not an afterthought; it is part of the process of reparation. It is part of a guarantee that what happened will not be erased from memory, distorted or repeated. When we preserve burial sites, mark them in a dignified manner and provide spaces for remembrance, we do more than mourn. We make accountability visible. We allow society to confront itself honestly, openly and with full, radical acceptance of its darkest parts and the darkest parts of us. Taken together, the human rights framework makes something very clear: the location of remains, the provision of dignified burial, preservation and memorialisation are not optional policy choices but legal and moral obligations.”
“Where burial records are missing, where remains may have been uncoffined and where burial practices may have been inappropriate, further forensic examination is a fulfilment of duty. Delay in action and hesitation prolong suffering and undermine the right to an effective remedy. They allow uncertainty to cement into injustice or for cement to be laid over burial grounds due to legislative gaps and for them to remain unnamed and unmarked. A rights-based approach is not about legal duties but about participation. It requires that families and affected communities are not onlookers to decisions made about their own histories. They must be consulted and informed. They must be heard. Decisions about investigation, excavation, preservation and memorialisation must reflect the voices of those most directly impacted.”
“We can achieve this without full excavation and we argue the State should work proactively to provide this. This is especially urgent on lands where development is planned. Human dignity does not end at death. International standards are clear. The dead must be treated with respect, graves must be protected and preserved and burials must be individual where possible. Remains must not be desecrated or disregarded. Dignified burial is not an optional gesture of compassion; it is part of fair and equal treatment in death. It is part of restoring honour where it was denied. It is part of ensuring no one is left behind, not in life and not in death. The State carries an obligation to investigate suspicious or unlawful deaths, which includes searching for and identifying remains where possible and when warranted.”
“When burial locations remain unknown, when records are destroyed or incomplete and when graves are unmarked or concealed, the violation does not rest quietly in the past – it persists. Families are left without certainty. They are left without a place to stand in their grief and without a site to mark or a place to lay their prayer. The right to truth and to know what happened, where a loved one lies and how they were treated is not merely symbolic; it is inalienable. It applies not only to the families but to society as a whole. Excavation must be approached with great sensitivity and care. That is why in our Bill we did not place a mandate on the State to intervene. The preference for the majority of families will likely be to know with greater certainty the final resting place of their loved ones.”
“What was taken in death can be recognised in memory but this is not simply about memory. It is about rights, obligations and what sort of State we choose to be. A human rights framework demands that we understand burial sites not as historical curiosities nor as administrative matters to be managed but as physical manifestations of violations of fundamental rights, where individuals died in circumstances of abuse, neglect, abandonment or enforced disappearance. The State's responsibility did not end with their deaths. It did not end at the moment of burial. It continues through the duties of investigating, identifying, preserving, acknowledging, memorialising and providing redress.”
“I once read of memory as a series of storehouses and when I think of the thousands of people across Ireland who carry their own private storehouses of memory and I think of the literal storehouses under the ground in places like Tuam, Bessborough, Sean Ross Abbey and others, I cannot help but see the painful symmetry between what is buried beneath the soil and what is buried beneath the living. Storehouses within storehouses within storehouses, and within those storehouses lies a truth and that truth exists whether we acknowledge or deny it. It calls on us as a society to make it present, not only as a private grief but as a shared memory. It calls on us to create spaces where truth can be received with care, where the past can be inherited with justice and where dignity can be restored.”
“This discrepancy between death and burial records is itself a cause for concern and given what we know about the extent of the undignified burials that took place at Tuam, it is not speculative to suggest that manifestly inappropriate burials likely took place on other institutional lands at an equivalent scale. After all, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I have thought a lot about social memory lately and what it means in the absence of identification, examination and memorialisation of those who are buried on institutional lands. I am reminded that I have always believed that memory lives within us, not only in our constructed memories of events but in collective memory, something that links our past, present and future selves together, telling us who we are.”
“It is a response to the gaps that we know exist within the Institutional Burials Act and seeks to recognise the undignified burials of thousands of children on institutional lands in Ireland. Some 9,000 children are known to have died in mother and baby homes and county homes between 1922 and 1988. The infant mortality rates in these homes were double the national rate, highlighting the extent of the abuse and neglect that occurred there. A total of 1,090 infants died at Sean Ross Abbey but burial records exist for only 259 of them. At Bessborough in Cork, where the infant mortality rate was as high as 75% in the early 1940s, 923 infants died, with burials documented in just 64 cases.”
“I begin my contribution on this Bill by recognising the ongoing work at Tuam, the careful, painstaking, deeply sensitive work that is unfolding there. It is difficult but necessary work which asks something of us all. A Zora Neale Hurston quote came to mind this week for me, "There are years that ask questions and years that answer". Survivors, family members and society more broadly have asked their questions and it is beyond time for us to fully answer them. How does a country that is still living its history, not studying it from a distance, find the courage to face what lies beneath its soil and within its people? How do we continue to hold the gravity and depravity of what happened in this country, not as something abstract but as something that has shaped real lives? It is with this in mind that we table this Bill today.”
“I cannot account for what is happening across the country. As I said, I am focusing on the communities I know the best. As we move forward in relation to community work, we must ensure we recognise that people are doing things differently in different parts of the country. We must not impose a health region model that potentially oppresses the exciting working that is happening on the initiative of people in some of those task forces because it removes their autonomy or changes how funding decisions are made and where the money is spent. We must ensure we uncouple certain elements as we go along in order to protect community work and drugs work in this country as part of the national drugs strategy.”
“That response is embedded in community development, with a focus on prevention, intervention and pre-stabilisation. Some cutting-edge violence intervention work is about to begin there. The services are gender-specific. All the services across those communities fall under the banner of the Canal Communities Local Drug and Alcohol Task Force. I am sure there are other examples. I know a lot of great work is being done in Tallaght in terms of crack cocaine initiatives, being able to do detached youth and street work and all that type of thing. The discussion on health service intervention from a methadone treatment perspective definitely needs to change in terms of its being the primary goal of drugs responses. Work within communities has moved and shifted and task forces have really acted as a container for some very exciting work.”
“There is an understanding that facilities historically known as methadone clinics have not moved with the changing nature and landscape of drug use in Ireland. Unfortunately, that conversation is at risk of being caught up in a conversation about drugs task forces, which have changed how they work over the years. I can speak most confidently about the canal communities of Bluebell, Inchicore and Rialto, so I will focus on that area. The methadone clinic there is now in a primary healthcare centre. All the services have moved and changed. In 2010, an amazing report on those communities, A Dizzying Array of Substances, embedded a response to problem drug use in those south inner-city communities in relation to how we do our work.”
“The draft publication of the new national drugs strategy was announced last week. I preface my comments by acknowledging that a public consultation will follow the publication of the draft strategy. It is extremely positive that the proposals will be opened up to a wider input. However, after reading the document several times, I have lots of concerns. There is positive language in it and positive measures that can be added to and built upon. However, readers who have spent a long time working in drugs policy and are embedded within it, as I have been, will spot issues and ask whether certain measures need to be added or fleshed out a little more. I hope the public consultation allows for that. One of my concerns relates to the health regions.”
“Until we get to the reality of care, we need to work night and day to make sure those who need our help the most are no longer institutionalised.”
“I draw attention to the documents thejournal.ie received in relation to the same issue, which showed that 449 people took their own lives between 2022 and 2024 who had been in contact with the HSE within the previous three weeks. They had had some form of intervention with the HSE for them to be then flagged on the internal system for suspected suicide. That is 449 people within a two-year period whom we know had for some reason presented to a HSE professional in some guise or other and went on to take their own lives. We can also see in those figures that one third of those who arrive at the emergency department with self-harm do not get assessed or meet a mental health professional. These are atrocious statistics but, more importantly, they are people and people's lives. We have mastered the language of care without the reality of care.”
“We currently still have the institutionalisation of people who need mental health supports. It should be an absolute scandal that this the position we are in that we sit in this big grey institution in the middle of the city centre and there is another big grey institution up there where people do not have their liberty or their needs met and are waiting for acute intervention in the Central Mental Hospital. That is beyond understanding. It is traumatising not only for the people in the prison but also their families who know how much they need intervention. I think there are also 55 people actively in psychosis on remand in Cloverhill. That is a gross underestimation of how many people are actually in need of mental health care on remand.”
“I raise the "RTÉ Investigates" programme last night. I am quite surprised it has not been a common feature throughout the Order of Business. A few weeks ago, I came into this Chamber and spoke quite graphically, not wanting to but sometimes speaking graphically is necessary for effect and hoping that it will land, about the number of people who have walked out of emergency departments and taken their own lives because of the lack of support and continuum in any sort of care they had or the experience they had while they were there. Last night, we saw that currently 38 people in the prison system are waiting for the Central Mental Hospital. We cannot pretend we no longer institutionalise mental health, those in need or those who experience any sort of adversity.”
“They are all at different stages of the system and the process. I want to raise the alarm that there are three men currently on day 16 of hunger strike outside these buildings and it has gone relatively unnoticed. I encourage people to check in with them and to alert the appropriate Departments of this so that we can have some sort of negotiation to end this and make sure these men do not do irreparable damage to their health.”
“There has been lots of conversation over recent years about how much asylum, direct provision, IPAS and all of these things are costing us. There is lots of misinformation and disinformation purposely aimed at migrants about what they are getting and not getting from the State. Yet, we have thousands of people who require a stamp 4 to go out to work and want to go out to work. It is a complete lie to paint so many people with the same brush in terms of what people demand, need and want. This campaign group, along with these men, is saying they need a stamp 4. They are saying that they need to be able to work and that they cannot leave direct provision unless they know they can affordably pay rent to a landlord. They are caught in a complete trap as soon as their right to work is removed from them for whatever reason.”
“They are experiencing lots of nausea and sickness and it is obviously becoming a risk factor at this time. Historically, people have protested directly outside the gates of Leinster House but these men are in the alcove or square on Kildare Street just before Agriculture House. I thought there was something quite striking about the fact that the men felt they could not sit outside Leinster House. There is something about being a migrant and an asylum seeker - you want to name what your needs are and ask for the right to work, but then there is also the fear of being too visible. I wonder what the thinking was in relation to where they placed themselves as they sought the right to work. As we know, people need to have a stamp 4 to have the right to work in Ireland.”
“Yesterday, I mentioned the White Paper on direct provision. This contribution follows on from that. Yesterday afternoon, I met with representatives of the Abolish Direct Provision Ireland campaign. I was unaware when I spoke yesterday that three men are currently hunger striking outside for the right to work. It is very sad symbolically where they are. When I went to figure out where the men were, to see about their health and what stage they are at on day 16 on just water, I found they have not had any health checks. When we have had hunger strikes outside in the past, the HSE has acted and sent those in charge of health equity, etc., to come to do health checks. Today, I have raised the alarm from a health perspective as the men are now quite confused.”
“From procurement to deployment to monitoring, AI systems used in public services must be rights-compliant from the outset, rather than retrofitted after harm has occurred. Human rights and equality cannot be an afterthought. Procurement must be transparent, it must assess all risk - environmental, equity, discrimination and potential abuses - and it must be very clear on who is responsible for addressing these risks.”
“We must reckon with the fact that the rapid increase in data centres and associated AI infrastructure is introducing an entirely new category of environmentally damaging activity not only in terms of the existential threat posed by climate change but also the pollution caused by these centres affecting our air, soil and rivers. As Ireland prepares to increase the share of our electricity grid dedicated to data centres, we must also engage with the associated financial risks of over-exposure to this sector in the Irish economy. Economists worldwide have raised concerns about the financial interdependence among these large companies and the need for continued growth. We must address our heightened exposure to this market. Finally, the public sector must lead by example.”
“The EU omnibus bill is presented as simplification but in practice, it erodes core GDPR protections as AI systems expand surveillance, profiling and automated decision-making, thereby gutting privacy law and data rights. We must honestly address the enormous environmental and climate ramifications of the rapid increase in AI infrastructure. OpenAI's own researchers have shown an exponential increase in the energy required to run these models with computing requirements doubling every 3.4 months. In Ireland, data centres consume more energy than the domestic use of 3.25 million people in urban homes.”
“Human rights law does not distinguish between harm caused by a missile and harm enabled by an algorithm and neither should our regulatory research or procurement frameworks. Returning to the domestic context, the Grok case exposes serious questions about enforcement and deterrence. Irish regulators already have the power to investigate, restrict and sanction harmful activities. If these powers are not being exercised, we must ask what threshold of harm is required to trigger fundamental rights in Ireland. Where AI systems generate and publish harmful material in a single automated process, accountability must follow. This leads to an unavoidable question. What real deterrent currently exists for AI providers that knowingly deploy systems with foreseeable abusive capabilities? We cannot wait for Europe to act.”
“We must confront the even more uncomfortable reality that AI is increasingly being used as tool of war. AI-enabled decision support systems are already being deployed in military operations. In Gaza, such systems have reportedly been used to generate large-scale targeting lists with minimal human oversight. One system known as "Lavender" produced a list of tens of thousands of people marked for assassination. Another system referred to as "Where's Daddy?" was designed to track individuals at home at night explicitly to enable strikes when families were present. These were described as decision support tools, and not weapons, yet they directly facilitated lethal force at scale.”
“Examples include facial recognition systems that misidentify people of colour, predictive policing tools that reinforce racist and class-based patterns and automated content systems that amplify fear and harassment faster than regulators can respond. These are not glitches but the predictable outcomes of deploying powerful systems that take away our control and autonomy. We need to clearly determine who benefits from the proliferation of AI. Artists and musicians are having their creative work stolen and instrumentalised in AI applications. Workers are being replaced by AI systems. Amazon today announced 16,000 job losses and last year the company’s chief executive told staff that AI meant the company would operate with fewer workers. The result of this automation is less to pay in wages and more profit for Amazon.”
“The harm is foreseeable and the conduct unlawful, yet the response appears to rely on future-facing processes rather than the immediate use of existing enforcement powers. This matters particularly for poorer and marginalised communities, who consistently bear the brunt of harmful AI deployment. Across the world we see AI systems being used in welfare administration, housing allocation, credit scoring, immigration control and policing. Too often these systems automate suspicion and intensify surveillance. When these systems fail due to error or bias, it is those with the least power, time or resources who pay the price. This is how inequality becomes automated. We have also seen where AI has gone wrong globally.”
“Those laws apply regardless of whether the material is produced by a human or by an automated system. Where an AI system generates sexualised images of real people without consent and makes them available to others, publication and distribution are inseparable. In such cases platforms cannot credibly present themselves as passive intermediaries. They are operating the systems that produce and disseminate the material. Under Coco’s Law, it is a criminal offence for a person or a corporate body to publish or distribute non-consensual intimate images. In the case of Grok, publication and distribution occur at the moment of creation. Automation cannot serve as a shield against criminal responsibility. This is not a matter of waiting for the AI Act or future frameworks; this law already exists.”
“That is why AI must be grounded in human rights and equality, not treated solely as an economic or technological issue. A technology-first approach is a bad approach. What we need instead are human rights and equality by design, built in from the very beginning. AI and its consequences dilute responsibility and shift it away from accountability. Recent events involving Grok, the AI system integrated into the X platform, bring this debate out of the abstract and into the realm of real-world and ongoing harm. This is not simply a regulatory or ethical issue but a criminal law issue under existing Irish law. Ireland already has clear laws prohibiting the creation, publication and distribution of child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate images.”
“I set this speech against the backdrop of a quote that underpins a lot of the work I do, especially in the evolving area of AI. It is from a book I read a few years ago by Virginia Eubanks called Automating Inequality. It states, "When automated decision-making tools are not built to explicitly dismantle structural inequities, their speed and scale intensify them". We know that around the world artificial intelligence is already shaping people’s lives in warfare, public services, policing, welfare, education and online. From the outset we must be clear about one thing: AI is not neutral. The way it is designed, deployed and governed reflects choices about power, priorities and values. These are not merely technical decisions but ethical and political ones.”
“I am not sure how far that has moved or what is being done so that we can afford people who live here dignity and respect in how they live together and how we live side by side with people who are seeking asylum in Ireland. I am hoping that we can have a debate or statements and an update from the Minister on the White Paper in regards to ending direct provision in Ireland.”