Hacking of picture hurt my father – McHugh

The former Green Party candidate found herself being ‘weaponised’ against MEP Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan, she tells Niamh Horan

Saoirse McHugh, the onetime Green Party election candidate, has described the posting of a naked image of her on social media by a stranger as “cruel and calculated”. Speaking for the first time about the incident, which resulted in the man behind the hack receiving a sentence of 150 hours of community service, Ms McHugh (33) told of the impact the incident has had.

Former European parliamentary assistant Diarmuid Hayes (34) admitted to a Belgian court last month that he hacked MEP Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan’s account and posted a tweet referring to Ms McHugh “skinny dipping”.

The tweet, posted on September 28, 2020, was posted without Mr Flanagan’s knowledge. The court heard Hayes had been upset with the MEP for not renewing his contract.

During the case, Mr Flanagan said his family have been “put through hell” and that he had to seek therapy due to the online backlash.

In her sentencing at the Palace of Justice in Brussels, Judge Isabelle Jacquemin fined Hayes €5,000 and warned he would face a 15-month prison sentence if he did not comply with the community service order.

Speaking to the Sunday Independent after the case concluded, environmentalist Ms McHugh, from Achill Island, Co Mayo, said that although she “wasn’t embarrassed”, members of her family had been affected.

“It didn’t bother me in the beginning. I don’t feel like it has affected my reputation — at least I hope not,” she said.

Describing the hack as “quite cruel” and “calculated to ruin Luke’s reputation”, she added: “I suppose from the start of this whole saga I have tried to take the approach that it has nothing to do with me. I just happened to be weaponised against Luke.

“I do know it really has upset my dad, for instance. I know Dad feels upset about it. It’s not nice to hear.”

Despite her reputation as one of the brightest young candidates in Irish politics, that is not the first thing that comes up when you type her name in a search engine.

“If you search now, that’s what comes up,” she said. “I know my dad is upset because he’s telling me, ‘This affected you as well, you should do something about this’. He has asked me, ‘Has this affected your reputation?’ He’s protective.

“I guess it’s a feeling of not wanting to see your child named in headlines in relation to something that’s just not very nice.”

With this being a key year in Ireland with both local and European elections in June, Ms McHugh feels the issue of social media is and will remain “a really big problem” for election candidates.

Asked if she had been subjected

Comments would range from ‘rude’ to ‘death and rape threats’

to abuse during her three political campaigns, she said: “Yeah, and once again, for instance, I know that it was my boyfriend who used to get really upset with people’s replies to me. I would just not even look at them.”

She said the comments would range from being “a bit rude” to “death and rape threats”.

“My boyfriend would go through them and block them,” she said. “I probably have a very large block list now. You’d get rubbish like another tweet with a noose, this type of thing. Twitter filters them in your messages. You have a folder of people you may know and then a folder Twitter has screened.”

In addition to trolling, Ms McHugh believes election candidates will have to deal with the equally serious issue of disinformation in the next general election.

“I think since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, in a lot of ways it’s become quite unusable. Misinformation, disinformation, they were always there, but now, you know yourself, when you look at a tweet, the first

100 replies are junk, just unusable rubbish. Social media has become so fragmented.”

Ms McHugh said candidates’ digital lives will be another issue for people considering entering the public eye.

“These days, people have so much of their life online, and I think this will be a problem going forward in terms of people wanting to go into politics, if things can get dragged up online. So, for example, how do we as a society allow people to be teenagers and be silly young 20-year-olds and then move on?

Ms McHugh believes “norms will have to develop” around being empathetic to mistakes that happen in an early part of a person’s online life.

“It’s one of the things that makes Twitter really annoying,” she said. “When people get worked up over something somebody posted when they were 17, you think, maybe you should just ignore it because people are actually constantly growing and learning.”

She hopes people will reach “a cultural understanding” that they do not “hold something somebody said or did” at an earlier stage against them.

Meanwhile, Ms McHugh, who works in Uplift — an online project that helps people launch and deliver campaigns for progressive change in Ireland — will marry her fiance Colm Cafferkey, also from Achill, in July.

As for running for a fourth time in the upcoming June elections, she said: “I have no plans.”