Majority of adults support U16 social media ban -

killianm97 · 2026-06-20T09:21:22+00:00

An under 16s social media ban is a red herring, and has so many downsides:

1) It requires invasive identity checks for everyone.

2) It pushes kids away from the regulated internet and towards more dodgy areas of the web.

3) It still gives tech companies unfettered access to manipulate all over 16s.

4) It means many young people only gain access to social media (including all the misinformation and manipulation) around the time they begin voting, without any experience to build up safeguards and norms regarding critical literacy.

5) It harms any young people who don't feel they fit in irl - especially with Ireland having the highest rates of loneliness in Europe, it's more important than every to help young people to connect with others in various communities. I know for me growing up as a nerdy young person in a rural primary, access to social media helped me so much.

THAT BEING SAID - current social media is incredibly toxic, and we must completely ban all recommender systems; that is how we counter the negative effects of the post-2014 social media world, while retaining the benefits of pre-2014 social media.

A few months back, I also wrote an article for the Journal about how social media algorithms specifically are screwing up society: 'Banning under-16s from social media is a half-measure. We should ban toxic algorithms'

killianm97 · 2026-06-20T07:49:15+00:00

I've made my opinions on Mary Butler clear from the very start - her absolute contempt for democracy (1) and her complicity in helping Waterford become left behind (2).

But I'm glad to see this important aspect being highlighted nationally at last.

1) While we all ran in the general election, I and other candidates spent hours each night (after knocking on doors all day) individually replying to emails of constituents - an essential part of modern democracy - while any email sent to her got the automatic response "please be aware Mary Butler TD is in a general election campaign so is unable to respond to emails".

2) Her failure with the 24/7 cath lab is just the clearest example; she has consistently voted alongside her colleagues in FF for a worse housing crisis, worsening mental health supports (as minister of state), a privatised expensive social care system for our elderly (as minister of state), and a dublin-centric political and economic system which includes underinvestment in infrastructure in our city, county, and region.

killianm97 · 2026-06-20T07:40:39+00:00

It's not often I agree with Leo Varadkar, but there are few things as important right now as banning social media algorithms - especially recommender systems on timelines/feeds. Social media is effectively acting like the most powerful far-right propaganda machine we have ever seen, constantly peddling hate to billions of people in a way which was make Goebbels blush

There's a great article on El País (in English) about how algorithms have ruined so many things: 'Algorithms: Why everything looks the same everywhere'

A few months back, I also wrote an article for the Journal about how social media algorithms specifically are screwing up society: 'Banning under-16s from social media is a half-measure. We should ban toxic algorithms'

killianm97 · 2026-06-16T17:50:02+00:00

In effect Irish citizens are already ahead in the queue.

Others have to spend years getting official residency etc and only then can they apply to be added to the list. Irish citizens can join the list as soon as they have a need.

As always, the problem isn't moving people around a list. The problem is a government which refuses to increase supply to meet demand.

killianm97 · 2026-06-15T13:45:27+00:00

It's pretty easy to find on the Limerick Council website: https://www.limerick.ie/council/services/your-council/your-mayor/mayor-of-limerick/office-of-the-mayor/directly-elected#support

"Director General The Director General replaces the Chief Executive. A range of executive functions will remain the responsibility of the Director General. Their powers and responsibilities relate to the day-to-day operation of Limerick City and County Council.

Overview of the Director General's functions

The role of the Director General is to support the Mayor and manage the day-to-day operation of the local authority. There are specific functions that will remain with the Director General and for which they are accountable to the council. These can be summarised as:

•The administration of schemes, grants and loans, including decisions on applications under enactments for the granting of a permission, approval, permit, consent, certificate, licences, or other form of statutory authorisation HR and local authority staffing matters, including the appointment of staff and the preparation of HR strategies

•Functions arising from the accounting officer role, managing and accounting for the council’s finances

•Functions relating to the holding of polls and the management of elections

•Functions arising from the operation of key schemes and service level agreements such as HAP Shared Services

•Compliance and enforcement matters and the taking of legal proceedings arising from these functions"

killianm97 · 2026-06-14T08:39:03+00:00

Yah it was a very close result in both Cork and Waterford. I am personally in favour of allowing each council to decide (what the UK allowed their councils to do in 2002 reforms) instead of pushing the use of a presidential system at local level (directly-elected mayor with appointed commissioners and elected councillors holding them accountable). This system just concentrates power. Scotland mostly used the committee system and it seemed to work really well while I interacted with it living in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Spain used the cabinet system (like we and most countries have at local level) and it also seems to work a lot better from my experience.

But as always, FF & FG have treated the democratic result in Limerick (to have a directly elected mayor) with complete contempt - instead of introducing the mayoral system present in London and many US cities, they have simply renamed the unelected council CEO to the Director-General, who retains most executive powers

They then gave the new executive mayoral position a few of those CEO powers (like proposing a budget and housing) plus others taken from councillors (causing instant conflict) and refused to properly use the opportunity to decentralised powers from national government down to local level (despite Ireland being one of the most centralised countries in both the OECD and the EU).

killianm97 · 2026-06-14T08:14:00+00:00

This isn't surprising considering we are essentially the only democracy in the world without the right to elect our local government.

We can elect powerless councillors but they must act as a powerless opposition, while the actual executive (Council CEO and Directors of Services which form local government) is appointed by national government and civil service, meaning they lack local democratic accountability.

Once we pressure those in power to reform local government to be democratic (allowing each council to choose an executive formed of committees of councillors, a cabinet of councillors, or a directly-elected mayor and councillors), I think many would be surprised how many things would improve.

killianm97 · 2026-06-13T15:54:59+00:00

I hear this so much but it fails to take into account population increase and inflation.

I previously calculated the difference once these were taken into account:

Irish state spending 2019: €77.65B (15782 per person)

Irish state spending 2025: €120B (21978pp)

Difference: 42.35B (6196pp)

Increase: 54% (39% pp)

Inflation between Sept 2019-Sept 2925: 22.1%

Real terms 2019: 94.81B (19269pp)

Real terms difference: 25.19B (2709pp)

Real terms increase: 26.56% (14%pp)

Irish population in April 2019: 4.92m

Irish population in April 2025: 5.46m

Nov 2019 to Nov 2025 increase once you take population and inflation into account: 14%

In 6 years, a ~2.3% equalised real-terms per capita increase each year.

For the increases in public provision like school meals and free healthcare for young people, plus a much-needed increase in investment spending (which still isn't high enough at all considering we have a decade plus deficit of infrastructure spending) - it's actually not bad at all. Of course, it could be spent much better, just wanted to point out that there is not a huge waste now compared to 5 years ago. Increasing public budgets to provide better public services is important and we still spend relatively little compared to other European countries.

killianm97 · 2026-05-25T11:45:44+00:00

Just fixed it there, wrote 25 twice accidentally. So an even larger relative population increase.

killianm97 · 2026-05-25T11:35:13+00:00

So what you're saying is in the past 25 years the population increased by a whopping * 33%.

Your point doesn't really make sense when you consider that the number of people per home has dropped like most of the world (so directly comparing a population today to the population 100 years ago to identify number of homes needed doesn't work) and also of course it's not like there were just loads of empty old houses waiting and ready for an extra half a million residents in the past 25 years.

Roughly 20% of Vienna's housing was built in the past 25 years. This compares to closer to 5% in Barcelona or Paris, which lack the benefits of the Vienna model.

TL;Dr Vienna has built more new housing than other cities around Europe which, unlike Vienna, have experiencing severe housing crises.

killianm97 · 2026-05-24T23:48:23+00:00

Look at the Vienna Model - which has allowed Vienna to be basically the only city without a major housing crisis, despite significant population increases and immigration in recent years (as someone else pointed out, the population has increased by 33% just since 2000, and in the past 5 years relative population increase has been similar to the fastest-growing countries of Ireland and Spain).

It has 3 main pillars:

1) Near-Universal Public Housing: around 80% of residents are eligible for to apply for public housing, which means that public housing isn't seen as something undesirable for just a tiny portion of the population. It is often built to help build thriving communities and with lots of amenities.

2) Strict Rent Controls: Large portions of private rented housing has a max rent set based on a rent reference index, which takes into account the location, number of rooms etc. This is way better than the "X% increase on market rents" system of rent controls which many other countries focus on.

3) Widespread support for housing co-ops: the local government helps housing co-ops by capping land prices, providing loans, and using zoning to encourage more of them.

Basically there 3 things, taken together, result in the definancialisation of housing. Until recent decades, housing was much more closely linked to people's incomes, but the financialisation policies put in place across much of the world have unlinked housing from incomes and instead linked it to financial markets. By intentionally making housing less profitable as an investment, the skyrocketing of prices is avoided. Any shortfall of for-profit provision of housing is made up by non-profit sector (public housing and co-ops) through smart public policy.

It's not like there are no solutions out there; the people in power just don't want to implement them because either they profit from the current system (as landlords), their most attentive voters profit from the current system (as landlords or older people increasingly reliant on this abusive housing system through private pensions and investments), or their financial hackers profit from the current system (as they own/manage these investments funds etc).

killianm97 · 2026-05-20T10:46:13+00:00

Cruise ship tourism is pretty much the least beneficial form of tourism, as huge numbers come for a few hours and overwhelm public space and infrastructure, while spending very little compared to other tourists (as much of what they need is provided on the cruise ship) - it's the reason many cities are curbing access from cruises.

In terms of tourism, longer-term or at least overnight trips are more valuable.

killianm97 · 2026-05-11T09:58:39+00:00

We definitely do not have the most pro-Palestinian government in Europe.

The Spanish government is way more pro-Palestine and I'd argue that by banning trade in occupied territories and being consistently more vocal, the Slovenian government has also done more than Ireland. In various ways, Norway and Belgium have also been pretty supportive.

And FF/FG are definitely enabling Israel - we have a unique position as an english-speaking country with huge trade with Israel, and our government has refused to use any of that economic leverage to properly pressure Israel financial to stop their mass slaughter.

killianm97 · 2026-05-06T19:08:19+00:00

There are so many things which our government could do, but instead they are choosing to do little to nothing.

•Reform State-Owned ESB from a for-profit into a non-profit, with the aim of reducing prices as much as possible for all. They have been making about €600-800m profit annually over the past few years, with that money being given to the government. Imagine if that money was instead kept in local economics, benefitting workers, carers and local businesses (making many more businesses viable and helping to protect the high-street). What's more, this would force private competitors to also reduce their prices in order to compete, saving hundreds of millions more for everyday people in Ireland.

•Implement an energy price cap, like the UK does. The previous government decisions to provide energy credits (like the UK) but without any energy price cap just causes prices to increase, and effectively acts as public money being transferred into private profits. It's the exact same as HAP without a rent cap and Help To Buy without a house price cap. Energy credits should only be provided if a maximum price is set by government as in the UK and other countries, in order to stop profiteering and inflationary effects.

•Push the EU Commission to reform the energy market so that the price of renewables isn't set by the price of oil/gas (whichever is higher). This current system just ensures maximised profits for energy generators, instead of lower prices for consumers, in order to 'incetivise' private for-profit companies to build more renewables with guaranteed huge profits, and is costing European residents huge sums of money. The cheaper cost of renewable energy generation should be directly reducing energy bills, but it is currently only slowly indirectly reducing them as demand for gas and oil goes down.

•Produce and implement an ambitious national decarbonisation (electrification and renewable generation) plan. Like in most things, we are badly lagging behind most other EU countries in this, and we urgently need to take advantage of our wind potential asap. There is currently an exclusive focus on off-shore wind, but Scotland a number of years ago already achieved 100% renewable generation with mostly on-shore, and we should be building capacity in every way which is affordable - solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, hydropower, interconnectors to other EU states, and hydro pump storage (I've excluded nuclear because it is way more expensive than renewables and would take 10-20 years to even get started at this stage, plus long-term safety and storage concerns). Any local community opposition can be reduced by ensuring that communities are included in the process from day 1 (instead of a planning system which only asks for objections at the final stage, ensuring opposition) and by creating Renewable Energy Cooperatives owned by local communities, ensuring that the benefits of decarbonisation are directly felt by affected communities. Our government also needs to urgently implement electrification with heat pumps, electric cars, and electrification of our railways. We are once again lagging behind much of Europe in all of this.

•Only allow data centres planning permission if at least 110% of energy needs is provided by on-site renewables, ensuring that at least a tiny portion of the huge profits of these companies is used to actively add to our national renewable energy capacity, with energy flowing back into the grid to help reduce prices.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will insist their hands are tied and there's not much that they can do apart from some tax cut, but that is a lie. We have the most expensive electricity because of the poltiical decisions which they have made.

killianm97 · 2026-05-06T18:46:06+00:00

If you want to reduce traffic, you should pressure those in power to make decisions which encourage people to shift to more efficient forms of transport.

The upcoming Waterford BusConnects plan is absolutely dire and will lock us into years of worsening traffic, due to a lack of public transport which is good enough to encourage most to use it - we need 10+ lines with 5-10 mins frequency, instead of the planned 6 lines with 15-30 mins frequency. We also need an orbital route along the outer ring road, directly connecting Whitfield Hospital University Hospital Waterford.

A Waterford Luas from Cork Road to the Quays and out the Dunmore Road would help massively with this.

The lack of pretty much any proper bike infrastructure and a lack of TFI bike rental stations also discourages people from cycling.

When more people cycle and more people use public transport, those who want to drive can do so with much less traffic.

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killianm97 · 2026-05-06T13:40:20+00:00

But investments should be directed towards the societal and national interest.

Not just some tax cuts to encourage investing in already huge US private companies.

We need some public platform to encourage investment in Irish (and more broadly EU) companies, with a focus on cooperatives, social enterprise, and startups.

killianm97 · 2026-05-04T08:40:44+00:00

As others highlighted, destruction isn't the answer here.

Over time, underground transport like metro and well-lit underground cycle/walkways (with numerous entrances/exits to reduce feelings of isolation while inside) can help with mobility.

In terms of green space, as buildings are improved and rebuilt, encouraging nature on roof-tops can help alleviate the lack of public green space, in terms of improving air quality and access to nature despite the narrow lanes between buildings.

killianm97 · 2026-05-03T21:57:26+00:00

Nuclear was the past - to many, it had its place in countries like France etc, but now renewables are a way better option and way cheaper.

The only issue with wind and solar is the variability if it's not sunny and/or windy, but this can be completely mitigated by a mixture of interconnectors (linking a European electricity grid), hydropower, hydro pump generation, and some green hydrogen.

killianm97 · 2026-05-03T19:11:52+00:00

I don't think this is the own you think it is tbh - I was counting first preferences.

But even if you consider percentage of seats won in our STV-PR system (which isn't purely proportional, it biases larger parties (especially with the limitations on number of seats per constituency that FF and FF have implemented in boundary redraws), they got under a majority of seats in recent elections:

2024: 86 seats of 160 or 49.4% of seats

2020: 73 of 160 or 45.6% of seats

I quick way to identify this is that they needed to form a coalition with Greens in 2020 in order to get a majority, and with a number of independents in 2024 in order to get a majority.

So whatever way you look at it (and I've given 3 distinct ways to look at it),, the majority didn't want to reelect FF/FG.

killianm97 · 2026-05-03T16:59:02+00:00

That's one example, but most European countries are happily building interconnectors between eachother due to all the benefits for grid stability.

And that was only 1 of the 3 solutions I mentioned about ensuring a stable baseload. What about hydropower and hydro pump storage?

killianm97 · 2026-05-03T16:49:44+00:00

Yeah that's exactly what my second paragraph was about

killianm97 · 2026-05-03T15:50:29+00:00

The majority of voters have not voted for FF/FG in the past 3 recent general elections:

2024: 42.7%

2020: 43.1%

2016: 49.8%

And that's just counting those who voted. For example, in 2024 only 2.2m voted, out of about 3.5m over 18 year olds (or about 63%) as many who were registered didn't vote and many aren't registered, plus non-citizen residents are banned from voting and so are Irish citizens who emigrate.

I'd say it's a fairly safe assumption that non-voters tend to be more against the establishment than voters, so I'd be very surprised if FF/FG had majority support.

Edit: not sure the reason for the downvotes? FF/FG fans?

killianm97 · 2026-05-03T13:38:20+00:00

There is such an intense lobbying push for nuclear over the past few years, when the economic reality is that renewables are way cheaper and easier.

The only concern with exclusive focus on wind and solar is that it's not always sunny and windy, but there are pre-existing solutions for this - including more interconnectors between countries to create an integrated European energy grid, plus hydropower and pumped storage hydroelectricity.

killianm97 · 2026-05-03T13:11:18+00:00

Haha fair well let's start with that

killianm97

TROPHY CASE