I’M NOT a journalist.
I think I could say I’m a columnist and I think I could say I’m a writer on account of a few published books. But I’m not a journalist.
I wish I was but I never trained as one and I never studied as one and I’ve never really worked as one.
It would be dishonest of me to claim I was one and it would be a disservice to the many people who actually have trained, studied, or worked as journalists for me to claim that moniker.
I write for this paper and I’m very pleased to do so, very pleased to be in the pages of the Irish immigrant paper of the UK. It means a lot to me. But I’m not a journalist.
I’m emphasising that because the gardaí have recently made a point of airing the problems they face with ‘citizen journalists'.
According to the gardaí they are facing increasingly dangerous and intolerable situations because of the activities of these so-called citizen journalists who are almost exclusively associated with the far right.
These people are even filming individual garda and uploading these encounters on to their social media sites.
Of course most people are unaware of these individuals but they are influential enough to cause real harm in the real world.
It was online reporting, after all, social media accounts, that fuelled the incidents last summer that led to the Dublin riots.
A little look at these people though does reveal an entire online Irish world that is deeply disturbing and that is utterly dominated by bigotry and hatred.
Firstly, though, what is a ‘citizen journalist’?
A citizen journalist is, if you like, much akin to a citizen plumber.
What I mean by that is, imagine if an individual went and bought all of the equipment needed to be a plumber, bought a white van and painted plumber on the side of it, and went around saying they were, indeed, a plumber.
They’d never worked as a plumber before, they hadn’t trained as a plumber, they hadn’t in fact any of the learned skills of plumbing. They just had the gear.
But they wouldn’t be a plumber would they? They’d just be someone with plumbing equipment. It really is that ridiculous.
I could buy a banjo tomorrow but unless I learned to play it could I call myself a musician?
Citizen journalists have microphones and recording equipment, which is, in many cases, simply a phone and they behave as if pressing play and record means they are journalists.
They’re not. They’re simply, and only, people with some equipment much akin to the equipment we all have on our mobile phones.
I’m not a journalist even though I’ve written for a newspaper for over twenty five years but if these people are journalists on account if having some journalistic equipment then I am a footballer because I used to play loads and I still have boots and a ball.
What they are is frightening. They distort and mangle events for their online followers. They describe themselves as true Irish nationalists.
They are a part of an entire online sub-culture that even involves a man who was once the leader of the minuscule Irish National Party who is now openly a Nazi.
Alongside his wife he runs social media accounts quoting Padraig Pearse, who had an English Brummie father, about the dilution of Irish blood and how Jews, Muslims, and Black people are destroying our nation.
His wife even, disturbingly, details the upbringing of their five home schooled children where Mein Kampf is on the reading list. From this dark world these citizen journalists operate.
It is very telling that the gardaí have pinpointed these people as a real issue.
There have always been cranks and strange people with terrible, horrible views.
The online world, gifted to us by the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg, means that these people now infect the real world. They impinge upon society.
One of the main Irish citizen journalists was once referred to in the Dáil as a ‘dog kicker and crèche creeper’ and I don’t imagine you need further details to see what calibre of individual we are talking about.
We used to laugh at these people, we still do and we still should do, but they are sinister. We cannot be sure they are such a laughing matter after all.
Joe Horgan posts on X at @JoeHorganwriter
See More: Citizen Journalism, Journalism
