EU Summits
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-27
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

The EU-African Union summit discussed the European Union's international digital strategy, which includes AI and online platforms. As the host country for so many big tech corporations, does the Taoiseach accept that Ireland has a unique responsibility to hold them to account? It is clear that is not happening. It is clear from the appearance of the Minister of State with responsibility for AI at our committee today that the main approach of the Government appears to be to hide behind the European Union and suggest the European Commission should act in order to shrink from taking action itself and just put it on the long finger.
It also seems the Government approach has been to take the word of unscrupulous big tech bosses like Elon Musk. There was a Government press release after the Minister of State, Deputy Niamh Smyth, met with X saying that "Grok, as integrated on the X platform, has been disabled from removing or reducing clothing on individuals worldwide." That was not true. I asked the Minister of State whether the Department had checked that out and whether it was true. It had not. In the course of the meeting, I was able to get someone in my office to use a VPN to pretend they were in Paris and, with my consent, create an image which undressed me. They said to the Minister of State not to worry and that this had been turned off worldwide when it has not been turned off worldwide and anyone with a modicum of tech knowledge will know how to get around this and continue to produce abusive materials. What will the Government do about it?

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-27/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:01+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-27