Aoife Barry reviews the media dynamics of GE24 for EDMO Ireland and FuJo.
After a three-week campaign, voting day has finally dawned. So how did the final week of campaigning look online?
As noted last week, the first major attack ad of GE24 was launched to muted fanfare when Fine Gael took aim at Sinn Féin and its potential plans for the ‘rainy day funds’. Since then, the floodgates have opened and more attack ads have been cropping up. One of them even takes advantage of another of this week’s most interesting moments, the viral video of Taoiseach Simon Harris speaking to Kanturk carer Charlotte Fallon.
Viral videos have been a thorn in Fine Gael’s side during its GE24 campaign. At the start of the campaign, the party was heavily criticised over comments by Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary about teachers during an event to endorse Peter Burke, a Longford-Westmeath candidate. It only took a few weeks before Fine Gael had another viral moment.
High profile party leaders like Harris are followed almost constantly by cameras on the campaign trail, and so potentially any moment could go viral. And while some other moments were shared online, this was different. The clip was shared widely on social media and even made the international press. As we know, Harris ended up swiftly apologising for how he spoke to Fallon.
One person who knew the power of the moment was Deputy Paul Murphy, the People Before Profit-Solidarity TD who cannily leveraged the moment for an attack ad. Murphy used a clip of the encounter as a chance to accuse Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil of having the money “to properly support disabled people”, while not having “the political will to use it”.
Another attack ad came from Fianna Fáil, using a clip of its leader Micheál Martin on the RTÉ Upfront debate to go for Sinn Féin’s juglar. Its question: “Where was the Sinn Féin movement for the last 100 years?”.
‘Plantation’ and ‘open borders’ claims
While the ads above are strongly worded, there are some ads in the past week that lean into anti-immigration talking points.
As highlighted by The Briefing, a Meta ad from Donegal Irish Freedom Party candidate Eamon McGee uses the phrase “plantation”, which is linked to the Great Replacement Theory.
Meanwhile, Irish Freedom party leader Herman Kelly claimed in this ad costing between €2K – €2.5K to place on Google, that Ireland has “open borders” (more on Ireland’s immigration system here) and blamed this for the housing crisis. The ad was shown between 150K and 175K times (some viewers might have watched it more than once).
While not an ad, Athlone candidate for Independent Ireland Noel Thomas claimed in a video shared on Facebook that “so many people coming into this country are getting everything for nothing”.
Roderic O’Gorman tweets resurface
On the topic of immigration, a series of tweets posted in 2021 by the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth resurfaced this week – despite previously surfacing and being clarified by Roderic O’Gorman in 2023.
The tweets in question were in eight different languages and referred to the publishing of a White Paper to End Direct Provision and to Establish a new International Protection Support Service on 26 February 2021. This paper sets out a new approach for accommodating applicants that seek International Protection in Ireland.
In February 2023, TD Carol Nolan asked the Minister in a parliamentary question to “explain the thinking behind his decision in February 2021, to write tweets in 47 different languages publicising the report recommending the end of direct provision and proposals to provide “own-door” accommodation to asylum seekers”.
O’Gorman clarified that the tweets were in the most common languages spoken by people in Direct Provision at the time. He further clarified the phrase “own-door accommodation”:
“‘Own-door’ in the context of the White Paper does not mean an applicant is given possession of a property, it means the property provided by the state for temporary habitation to a person while their application for international protection is being assessed has its own door into a family unit, and is not a congregated accommodation setting.”
This week saw O’Gorman’s tweets resurface yet again. A video allegedly recorded by a woman being canvassed by O’Gorman, in which she asks about the tweets, was shared by an Irish far-right X account where it was viewed 4.2k times and reshared 1.6k times.
In this video, the woman asks if people due to be accommodated near her home were “the ones that you tweeted and invited in eight languages”. The reply to the woman is that “he never invited anybody” and it is a “far-right rumour” and “there wasn’t any such tweet sent”. The same video, reedited with new visuals and captions, was shared on YouTube, where it garnered 21K views.
Independent candidate Philip Dwyer shared the video on X, where it was viewed over 2.5k times. In one X post (originally posted on TikTok) viewed over 13k times, the tweets were collated in a video and misrepresented as O’Gorman “[promising] migrants free accommodation” – this video also contained audio from the video of the woman being canvassed.
National Party candidate and sitting councillor Patrick Quinlan reshared an X post about the tweets, claiming that O’Gorman said the tweets “never happened”.
The implicit claim by those criticising O’Gorman’s 2021 tweets is that they were a “pull factor” that led to an increase in asylum applications – despite O’Gorman clarifying their intent and the meaning of the phrase ‘own-door accommodation’.
Irish language concerns
Video sharing app TikTok doesn’t allow political ads, but an interesting story broke during the week about a campaign group that submitted ads to TikTok that contained disinformation about voting. The ads were submitted in English (14) and Irish (14), and three of the English ads were approved while eight of the Irish language ads were approved.
Though the campaign group, called Global Witness, withdrew the ads before they could be published, it raised alarm over the fact some were approved in the first place. It also raised concerns about a potential moderation “blind spot” when it comes to the Irish language.
TikTok pointed out that the majority of the ads were rejected at the first stage of moderation, and that it has its own dedicated in-app election centre. More on this here.
Political satire?
‘Political satire’ was the reason Aontú shared a doctored image this week, The Journal reported.
The doctored image of a poster of Taoiseach Simon Harris reading ‘More Waste. Note, it Wasn’t Me’ was shared by both the party Aontú and its leader Peadar Tóibín on X on Sunday 24 November, with the claim that the posters were “going up around the country”.
Aontú itself told the PA news agency the posters were not real. A party spokesperson claimed that it was “obvious to all that the poster depicted in Deputy Tóibín’s tweet is satire”.
Final Factchecks
The final debate of the campaign took place on Tuesday, when presenters Sarah McInerney and Miriam O’Callaghan grilled the party leaders of Sinn Féin, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil on RTÉ’s Prime Time.
The Journal factchecked several claims made during the debate, around public service pay restoration, inflation, energy price increases, carbon taxes and emissions, housing and more.
A separate factcheck highlighted how knotty some of the claims made by candidates in a live debate setting can be. On RTÉ Upfront on Monday, Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín claimed that “One third of all hospitality outside of the M50 are currently in a contract with the state to provide accommodation”.
But as this factcheck showed, the situation was different – and even Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman, who countered Tóibín’s claim on air, didn’t get the figure exactly right either.
Media coverage and social media interaction
What were the main topics being covered in the media, shared online and reacted to online this week?
According to Newship data which we gathered about the topics of cost of living, housing, immigration, public services and climate change, one topic garnered the most articles published between 22 and 29 November: housing.
The week began with housing heavily dominating, with between 70 and 80 articles tracked on Monday and Tuesday. But it took a huge leap on Wednesday, with over 157 articles published on the topic.
Climate change and immigration were the next most-covered topics this week according to our Newswhip data.
As for public interaction, it was immigration that dominated here. After a peak the previous Friday for housing (1.7k interactions), interaction dipped before rising towards Thursday. One of the biggest articles interacted with on Tuesday was from RTÉ, about the IRC being concerned that asylum seekers will be put back on the streets.
The topic of immigration, meanwhile, built from a slow start to peak at over 2k interactions on articles on Tuesday. But it quickly dipped again as interaction on housing took over. One of the articles with the highest level of interaction all week was a Gript interview with the aforementioned candidate Noel Thomas about immigration.
Interaction on climate change articles stayed relatively steady, as did cost of living and public services.
Not so Blue Sky…
Finally, last week we looked at the fact most Irish political parties are not active on Bluesky (seen by many as an alternative platform to X).
It transpires that some people are impersonating parties on Bluesky – including a fake Simon Harris account that warned people about spreading election misinformation. Read more at The Journal.
