For a flavour of the sort of things Government TDs have been saying about campaigners out of the glare of these public fora where they will be engaged with, here’s a redacted email from FF TD, Niall Collins which was sent on to me.

This is Simon Harris’ Junior Minister.

“There is a repulsive online campaign where some very nasty people are exploiting this situation and the vulnerabilities of some.

Please don’t let the online trolls and bullies peddle their fake news and lies unchecked”
@NiallCollinsTD can you link me to this repulsive campaign

Because I have been campaigning online this week with some of the best people Civil Society has to offer.

And they’ve been running an academically rigorous, source-citing, law quoting argument.

And I’ve been so busy supporting and admiring their output, I must have missed it.

And it would be doubly useful, because the average person might think you’d referred to one or all of a small, and identifiable group of women, mostly, of impeccable character.

So identifying the liars you were thinking of would be really handy disambiguation.

This other, parallel, campaign run by nasty people telling lies and exploiting vulnerable people sounds terrible.

Maybe they were the people your government colleague Mr Ward TD referred to under parliamentary privilege last week?

This other campaign seems to have been to the forefront of a number of government TDs’ minds. https://twitter.com/aoifelaw/status/1320860976338636800

Which is a strange focus, because the campaign run by honest advocates for adoptees had a particularly good week this week- starting the largest and fastest-growing petition in Irish political history. https://my.uplift.ie/petitions/repeal-the-seal-open-the-archive