Tony O’Brien

The new Policing and Community Safety Authority (PCSA) was established today.
Combining the functions of the Policing Authority and An Garda Síochána Inspectorate, the PCSA will also take on an additional Community Safety role in ensuring that people in Ireland are not only safe, but feel safe.

My contribution to the debate in Physicians Associates in todays Sunday Independent.

www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

Debunked: Enoch Burke payment claim that was shared by Musk is filled with misinformation

www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

Disability priorities and taxation folly are HSE pressure points

As per my column today in the Sunday Independent

New AI initiative for urgent and emergency care in NEL Thousands of patients across North East London are set to benefit from new initiative, using artificial intelligence (AI) and personalised clinical…

www.hn-company.co.uk/new-ai-initi...

I tend to agree.

Me popping back to Twitter to see if it's improved....

The English Law definition of misadventure is fairly precise “death caused by a person accidentally while performing a legal act without negligence or intent to harm”

Calling media watchers! If you want to know the voting intentions of readers of every news source from The Irish Times to Gript, along with how RTE and Virgin Media viewers plan to vote next Friday, you'll find it all all in the Sunday Independent. And very interesting it is too, I must say

Colin P Doherty on LinkedIn: Incredibly profound, moving and deeply shocking eye witness testimony from… Incredibly profound, moving and deeply shocking eye witness testimony from Prof Nick Maynard from Oxford who has spend more than a decade providing surgical…

www.linkedin.com/posts/colin-... www.linkedin.com/posts/colin-...

My column this week in the Sunday Independent looks at high cost OPW vanity projects and the runaway budget and timeline at the NCH and how we got here

Very much so - thank you. Hope you too.

We have used Twitter – now X – for many years. It has been a resource for story-gathering, network-building, and a megaphone for getting public-interest stories to a wider audience. And it has been a well of ideas and discourse. Unfortunately that well is now poisoned. All of us have seen X become more toxic and broken since Elon Musk took over in 2022. Feeds have become less useful. Engagement has plummeted, except for those who will pay. Replies gain traction not through merit, but through the corrupted blue-tick system. We have seen hate speech and abuse deliberately dialled up and amplified, boosted not just by the algorithm, but by the owner himself. And England’s racist summer riots were one of many factors suggesting to us that X is not a neutral platform, but a space that now seems to glorify misinformation at a great cost to our public sphere. Millions of people are ditching X, and we are doing so, too. We have taken the view that it is no longer a useful tool for objective reporting, but a weapon being wielded by a narrowing ideological set. A tipping point is coming. Perhaps we are already in it. After much consideration, we have taken the decision to move over to other platforms, in particular Bluesky. For some of us that means instantly deleting our X accounts, for others it is a more gradual process. But we are all putting the majority of our efforts into building more constructive online spaces elsewhere for political dialogue and reporting. Bluesky is becoming a new hub for political discussion, and we encourage other UK journalists to join and become active. We are already seeing far higher engagement on our posts there than we’ve seen recently on X. And importantly, the mechanisms to limit abuse actually work. We enjoyed Twitter while it lasted. It played an important role in shaping many of our careers. And it was, for a long time, the place to be for UK politics. We believe that time is now over. Twitter is dead. Long live Twitter

NEW: "Moving Off X: An Open Letter from UK Journalists"

UK political journalists: "Twitter was, for a long time, the place to be for UK politics. We believe that time is now over...

"We have taken the decision to move over to other platforms, in particular Bluesky" docs.google.com/document/d/1...