And so it has come to this. That after a robust debate and process of consultation on the local issue which saw the highest level of engagement for decades, what has come to light is the extent of the written threats and online abuse that emanated over the past few weeks.
I listened to the Mayor of the city open her heart this week about the abuse that she and her fellow councillors received during the course of the cycleway process. Our Mayor is a formidable politician who is never reluctant to throw herself into the fire of any political debate. It is not as if she is thin-skinned or overly sensitive, but she spoke with great conviction this week in the wake of the contentious vote on the toll that this abuse takes on people.
She said that these remarks scrape away at the confidence of those who they are directed against, that they do not take into consideration the humanity of the person behind the role.
Later other councillors spoke about the abuse that accompanied the discourse around this topic. So what, some people will say. Don’t they deserve it, say others.
I read someone online this week trying to justify that cyberbullying the city councillors was ok because of the way they had voted. To justify bullying? Is this where we have gone to?
As voters, we are entitled to ask politicians and councillors to do our bidding, to create a society that rhymes with the way we would like it to be. Sometimes, this works out and they make decisions that reflect the opinions of the citizens. But the reality is that many times it does not. It leads to frustrations and annoyance.
And although we might aim to personalise these frustrations, there is nothing to be gained by robbing someone of their dignity, creating a heated discourse that might endanger their safety.
Words do have consequences as we have seen across the world. Not everybody can read the nuances in messages; other just see too many nuances. Often these messages act as a call to action.
In the past few years, we have seen national politicians killed in the course of their duties in the UK, and there are hundreds of cases of vile abuse and threats against Irish politicians; the majority of whom are female.
A recent research project involved an examination of more than 2.6 million tweets mentioning 851 politicians in this country.
The tweets were filtered through Google-designed anti-abuse technology to determine whether comments were abusive.
Dr Ian Richardson, who works as a data scientist, self-published the research and discovered that more than 38,000 threats toward politicians were identified along with 15,842 sexually explicit comments and 77,040 insults. What was described as “toxicity” was identified in 72,552 tweets and “severe toxicity” was found in 26,866 comments.
The research, which reviewed tweets posted between September 2020 and September last year, found abusive comments about TDs increased significantly around political controversies.
The intensity of these insults is increased when there is something at stake; there has been much eloquent and reasoned debate on the cycleway matter this week. There will be other issues of equal and greater import in the coming years. If we allow too much playing of the person and not the ball, we will discourage good people from participating in our public discourse. And the loss would be all ours.
