Michelle O’Neill urged to ensure removal of clip targeting DUP MLA

By Rebecca Black, Press Association

First Minister and Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O’Neill has been urged to ensure the removal of a social media video “targeting” a DUP MLA.

The clip posted by Ógra Shinn Féin on Friday shows DUP Pam Cameron appearing to criticise her party colleague, Communities Minister Gordon Lyons, during a meeting of the Stormont Communities Committee.

It attributes quotes to Cameron, including a reference to a “desperate shameful act by a Communities Minister who’s clearly determined to make Irish invisible” during a debate over funding for the Northern Ireland Place-Name Project.

The caption includes the line “Disclaimer: This is not AI”.

Cameron told the Northern Ireland Assembly on Monday that the clip was a “complete misrepresentation of the actual facts”.

“Last Friday the official youth wing of Sinn Féin posted a video clip online which they insinuated was a statement made by me attacking the Communities Minister during a committee session,” she told MLAs.

“The post described the statement as not AI, implying it was therefore factual. The post has received many comments and views and its intention is clearly to bring negative unwanted personal attention toward me, it’s to intimidate, to humiliate, to gag me, and Mr Speaker it will do nothing of the sort.

“This was a complete misrepresentation of the actual facts.

“I would ask that the First Minister ensures that the post be removed and that Michelle O’Neill distance herself from that potentially defamatory content.”

Cameron said she is “disgusted by the post”.

She also criticised the committee meeting, at which Lyons appeared on Thursday, as an “absolute farce”, and claimed there has been a “TikTok theme of pelting words out at the minister and then continually interrupting and speaking over the minister and laughably trying to pretend that it was a form of scrutiny”.

“I must, however, put on record that no other committee member was involved in this other then the Sinn Féin members,” she told MLAs.

“In an era where it’s difficult to put anything on social media without facing a barrage of abuse, especially as a woman, I ask the First Minister to call out this dishonest, childish, and malicious behaviour.

“Having served on many committees within the Northern Assembly over many years, I have never experienced anything like the debacle which was dressed up as a scrutiny committee last week.”

Sinn Féin has been approached for a response.