Address to Seanad Éireann by Members of the European Parliament Seanad Éireann — 2026-09-23 ============================================================ Evanne Ní Chuilinn (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach I welcome the MEPs. It is great to have them here. I was going to use all my time to speak about the European Week of Sport, which begins today, I think. I had the opportunity last year to go to Brussels and speak at the European Parliament during European Week of Sport along with Nina Carberry, MEP. There was a great discussion about women in sport, inequality and all that. I will get to that because acknowledging European Week of Sport and what we can do both here and at EU level to encourage more people to get involved in physical activity is a good thing. However, I have just come from the most infuriating media committee meeting with the social media companies. Ms Doherty mentioned online safety for children and Mr. Ó Ríordáin mentioned AI and the difficulties we are facing with AI in the employment space. I would like to reiterate what I said downstairs in the committee room, which is that artificial intelligence is very intelligent. I cannot understand how media companies cannot ban videos from being uploaded in the first place using AI. I could not get a response from TikTok an hour ago on why the company could not use this amazing tool called AI to ensure videos of dangerous driving, gender-based violence, criminal activity or any videos of that nature are not ending up on our platforms. I cannot understand how that is. I am going to speak specifically about gender-based violence and about femicide and use some of the statistics we have for Ireland. Femicide in Ireland has increased by almost 50% this year. There have been ten instances of femicide, up from seven in 2025. Some 287 women have died violently in Ireland since 1996. In 63% of these instances they were killed in their homes and 87% of women were killed by a man known to them. We know gender-based violence does not just happen on a given day. These women are on watchlists. It is a result of behaviour that has often been festering for years. What has happened in the era of these tech companies and online social media platforms is there a place online now to cultivate, spread and encourage male supremacy and antifeminist behaviours and it is very worrying. There was a research project done recently by DCU, funded by the Department of justice. It was called "Recommending Toxicity". The authors created ten online accounts that were, mar dhea, owned by 16- and 18-year-old boys and men. No matter whether those accounts actively looked for misogynistic videos, they were fed them over and over again. Regardless of what was being sought or what was looked at in the first instance, these videos were being fed to these accounts, which were purporting to belong to teenage boys and 18-year-old men. The accounts were being run by researchers but it is very worrying. Some 90% to 95% of deepfakes on the internet are nonconsensual pornographic images depicting women. I am aware addressing all this is not easy but there was mention of making tech companies responsible and there is a way to go there. Addressing all of this is a priority for Fine Gael. I thank the Fine Gael Women's Network for its advocacy and submission of proposals to public representatives on how we can combat domestic, sexual and gender-based violence, particularly in an era of that online content because it is all just spreading. There is a range of EU legislative instruments that aim to tackle these issues, including the Digital Services Act. The EU KIDS Act was mentioned as well. However, I would really like the MEPs to update the House on the work that is ongoing in the European Parliament to strengthen these legislative instruments further because from what I saw downstairs, Coimisiún na Meán is hamstrung. We are all hamstrung by certain regulatory and legal frameworks. At the moment, the likes of TikTok are getting away with uploading these videos. Sometimes they are taking them down in 24 hours, sometimes they are not, but they should not be going up in the first place. We in this House, and in the Dáil and European Parliament, have a responsibility to be more proactive about making sure those videos cannot go up in the first place. I will come back to European Week of Sport because it begins today. It is an opportunity to promote the benefits of sport and physical activity. It is an opportunity for the EU to connect with citizens across the Union to promote a vision of sport that is inclusive of all abilities and ages. The current framework that guides EU sports policy runs to December 2027. There will be a successor. It is interesting that it is parallel with the national sports policy in Ireland. I will be doing a bit of work over the next year or so with stakeholder engagement with the sector. I would be really happy if the MEPs would be happy to take a report from the research I do here in Ireland for the next Irish sports policy because it looks like the next European sports policy will run along the same timeframe. If they are open to receiving some of that information, I would be delighted to send it on. --- 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/seanad/2026-09-23/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:49+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-23