Legislation needed to face down Garda footage from ‘Facebook and Twitter warriors’ - Limerick TD

LOCAL politicians have said they’d look at legislation to face down the “Facebook and Twitter warriors” who share footage of gardai on the internet.​

Fianna Fail TDs Willie O’Dea and Niall Collins, Independent member Richard O’Donoghue, and Cllr Adam Teskey, who chairs the Joint Policing Committee, have spoken out after calls were made to ban the videoing of officers on the beat.

Clare TD Cathal Crowe had urged the outlawing of such filming, saying protesters were “taunting” officers with videos. But his comments were described as “ridiculous” and “populist nonsense” by Sinn Fein’s Maurice Quinlivan.

Mr O’Donoghue said: “Nobody is safe from their phone anymore. There is no privacy any more. I don’t think anyone deserves to be videoed while doing their work.”

He said since being elected to Dail Eireann, he’s noticed “the Facebook and Twitter warriors”.

“They’ve a comment for everything. They must be the most perfect people in the world,” said the County Limerick TD.

Cllr Teskey said: “There are not many jobs which put you in the position where you should be scrutinised and filmed. Therefore, I don’t think it’s fair for members of An Garda Siochana to put up with this degree of intimidation at times. Members of An Garda Siochana go out and do Trojan work for our communities in terms of engaging, in terms of tackling crime.”

The Fine Gael councillor also pointed out that data protection laws prevent the local authority even seeing its own CCTV footage of dumping as it needs to first be signed off.

“Yet we have a situation where anybody can go out and upload a video through a social media platform, and it can go viral within seconds,” he pointed out.

Mr Quinlivan argued that were it not for phone footage in America, the murder of George Floyd may have gone unpunished. “I don’t believe there would have been any conviction other than the video that was there. I don’t think there would have been the outrage and the systematic change to policing across in America,” said the TD.

He said while filming gardai is not something he’d encourage people to do, bringing in a “blanket ban” would be “very dangerous”.

Mr O’Dea urged further discussion, while Mr Collins, an ex-Fianna Fail justice spokesperson said there should be regulations around the use of the footage.

Gardai did not respond to a request for comment.