A fundraising stint at the GOAL Ireland aid agency; Head of Social Action and Manager, Learning & Development gigs at Google; three years as MD of Assume Nothing Media, which produced social justice and human rights documentaries and factual content; and spells as first Director and then Chief Commissioner of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, the latter ending in February 2024.

Sinéad Gibney’s route to Dáil Éireann has been a circuitous – and fascinating – one. A first-time Social Democrats TD who unseated Green Party minister Catherine Martin before Christmas in Dublin-Rathdown, she’s also the party’s Spokesperson for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation; Enterprise, Tourism and Employment; Foreign Affairs and Trade; and Defence.

A Glastonbury regular who makes an immediate beeline for the Tom Waits cover hanging in the Hot Press office, Gibney credits another legendary US musician with her political awakening.

“Michael, my brother, got me into Bob Dylan and helped me navigate my way through his records, which was a big bonding thing,” she recalls. “Dylan’s lyrics were so incredible and, of course, he has that connection with Ireland. The new movie, A Complete Unknown, is really good and keeps the music central. Like most biopics it’s mildly sanitised but the acting is superb.”

Let’s put Sinéad to the Bob test: favourite Dylan gig, track and album?

“I brought my daughter when she was just a baby to see him in Nowlan Park, Kilkenny which was amazing,” she resumes. “I’ve had the opportunity to see him again but took the advice that, ‘If you’ve seen him play well once, don’t risk it!’

“I love his version of ‘Corrina Corrina’ but as it’s an old blues standard I’ll go for ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ as my favourite song and Blood On The Tracks as my album.”

Gibney’s musical credentials don’t end there.

“My first gig in the ‘80s was the Pixies in the Point and I was also a Curehead. I used sugar and water to achieve the Robert Smith hair – I can’t tell you how painful it was to get out! – and recreated it a few years ago when I saw them at Electric Picnic. Someone I can’t stop listening to at the moment is Little Simz and that song ‘Gorilla’.”

Sinéad Gibney in her Curehead days.

After a period of Irish artists desperately playing it safe, is she pleased to see the likes of Kneecap, Fontaines D.C. and Lankum ruffling establishment feathers?

“Absolutely,” she nods. “It’s wonderful to see bands deal with social issues. It’s really important, because it introduces politics and policy to young people. I love that there’s a lot more feminism from young women artists like Chappell Roan.”

Asked whether becoming a TD has been a shock to the system, Sinéad nods and says: “It’s overwhelming but also incredibly enjoyable. Not to sound too arrogant about it but I really feel like I’m where I was supposed to be. I’m quite unusual in that I’m coming to it in my late forties and bringing a real depth of experience from the human rights, equality and tech sectors.

“One of the hardest things to do – and a lot of TDs have said this to me – is getting the balance right between your contribution to the Dáil and your portfolio, which in my case is very large, and your constituency work. I was the first parliamentary Social Democrat candidate in Dublin-Rathdown – we only have one local rep there – so as a constituency I don’t think they’re familiar yet with who we are as a party. We need to do a bit more work to bed ourselves in there. I want people to know that they can come to me and I’ll represent their views on national policy in the Dáil, and challenge the government if they feel they’re not being listened to.”

The opening months of the 34th Dáil have been blighted by the Lowry speaking rights row. What’s Gibney’s take on it?

“The simplicity of it is that Lowry and the independents he’s aligned with are government TDs,” she shoots back. “Everything else is fabricated on behalf of the government. It’s disheartening that they’ve started this Dáil term with such a divisive move. I was surprised at how in the first few days, the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste chose not to step in and defuse the situation – and then seemed to think it was appropriate to depict that the opposition were louts and causing this disruption when really it emanated from the government benches.

“That’s a level of cynicism I didn’t expect. It looks like it’s going to rumble on, which is hugely problematic because it’s blocking our ability as a parliament to set up committees and deal with the issues we need to deal with. We will hold strong and do everything we can to maintain what is a fundamental principle of democracy; that the opposition should be facilitated to hold the government to account.”

The flipside being that the Lowry debacle has elicited a unified response from the actual opposition. Is this the start of a closer aligning of the parties who want to break the Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael’s stranglehold on government?

“You hear it from voters who say that they’re frustrated with the fragmentation on the left,” Sinéad reflects. “As a party we are very focused on building a new political movement and are connected with an entirely new audience who wouldn’t necessarily otherwise be getting into politics. It’s a really good sign that the opposition parties have come together and personally I do plan to be as collaborative as I can – both within opposition and when I’m working with government on amendments to a bill or a motion.

“You also have to be realistic in that we are all individual parties and have our own identities. Within the dynamics of being a smaller or bigger party, you have to be careful about holding on to that identity. Holly, as our leader, has been so strong on us wanting to do politics differently. That’s what people are responding to.”

With her background in human rights and social justice, Gibney is deeply concerned by Elon Musk’s slashing of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which has eliminated 90% of the organisation’s estimated 11,100 foreign aid contracts. From 600,000 Bangladeshi women and children losing access to critical maternal health care to cash-based support for a million Ukrainians being withdrawn, it’s plunged the overseas aid sector into arguably its deepest ever crisis.

Elon Musk

“To give you just one example,” Sinéad resumes, “there are thirty-nine million people on our globe who have HIV. Thirty million of those are receiving treatment for it and twenty million of them are accessing that treatment through USAID. Because of the ceasing of that funding, in a few months’ time they are going to start dying.

“People maybe think about aid in terms of it being charity, but aid is a really important part of conflict resolution, peace building and security. It prevents conflict from erupting in different parts of the world and deals with the fallout of previous conflicts. If we see further cuts – and it’s not just the US although that’s the most dramatic issue – we’re just storing up trouble.”

Gibney highlights that with some more stark statistics,

“A US official has said that a pause in US aid for one year is going to increase malaria cases by 40% and tuberculosis by 30% . Ebola is another concern. These are diseases that – if not contained – will affect us all.”

It’s also estimated that, because of the cuts, two hundred thousand more children will be paralysed by polio over the next decade.

Asked whether she’s ever come into Elon Musk’s orbit, Sinéad says: “Not really, but I was in the tech sector for eight years which is a very small ecosystem. I had friends who worked in Twitter when he arrived there, and were among some of the first to go. They’d have been in policy, legal and fact-checking, which were the sort of spaces he cut. I’ve never had any interactions with Elon Musk nor would I have an appetite to. I think what he did in Twitter and now DOGE is really quite appalling.”

Would she buy a Tesla?

“Never, no!”

We’ve had the double-jab of the UK cutting its aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of GDP to fund increased defence spending.

“There are other European countries who have been doing the same,” Gibney notes. “Ireland has a role to play here because we have a strong reputation in overseas development aid. We need to make sure that, where USAID has walked away from certain crucial projects, the EU equivalent, ECHO, does everything it can to step in.”

Sticking with Elon Musk and his fellow tech bros, the UK government is proposing a social media ban for children under sixteen. Is Gibney in favour of a digital age of consent being introduced here?

“We’d need to have a much longer conversation before I would commit to that being the exact way to go,” she proffers. “I was working in the tech sector when the UK was previously talking about age verification as a tool for online safety, and it was clear from my colleagues and peers that this was just a blunt tool to use. I don’t think we’ve come on much further as policy-makers from that. You do not want young people, for example, sharing with platforms their personal identification.

“There are lots of ways in which we need to be much more sophisticated about how we deal with this. We have to get the balance right because young people get so much from the online space, which I don’t believe is all bad. I’m very positive about technology and AI – but at the moment we’re not regulating it enough or equipping our children enough with the tools they need to interact safely online. The lack of regulation and the centralisation of power in this space in big tech companies is the problem.”

Gibney was disappointed by what she describes as “the watering down” of last year’s EU Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act.

“The regulation in this space is far too focused on the industry and how it might stifle innovation. We need to create and foster entrepreneurship, but we also have to think about AI and technology as a society and we’re not doing that. AI brings with it so many existential threats for us as a species – such as labour displacement.”

In terms of accountability, should X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram etc. etc. be treated like publishers and have the same legal obligations as Hot Press, the Irish Times and RTÉ?

“Yes, the same standards upheld by the traditional media should be applied to the online space,” Gibney asserts. “X has a business model that profits on polarisation. We know that, it’s not a contentious thing to say anymore. That is driving division in our society and compromising our democracy.”

Musk saying “We can’t afford more moderators” doesn’t really wash when he’s about to officially become the richest man in the world.

“It’s quite equivalent, what he did with Twitter and what he’s doing now with the US Federal Administration. He’s going after those parts of it which are the safeguards, which are the controls and the backstops.”

Gibney is also concerned about the proliferation of violent pornography on social media platforms.

“You wouldn’t have a big widescreen on Grafton Street showing the things that are depicted in violent pornography online and which a child has in their pocket.

“I want to be clear – I’m not anti-pornography, but we have to ask ourselves as a society, ‘Are we okay that women are routinely being depicted like this?’”

The impression I get listening to the likes of Musk and Mark Zuckerberg is that they really don’t give a damn about ethics.

“Yeah, it’s grim,” Gibney concedes. “The sector isn’t just tech bros though. There are a lot of people working in these companies who are really concerned with the direction of travel. There’s also a lot of them who are in really precarious situations. I’ve a friend who left Google to set up a workers’ rights movement for people in the tech sector because of Uber and all those gig economy apps.”

Sinéad has already spoken in Dáil Eireann about gender-based violence. It’s emerged that Kyle Clifford, the Crossbow Killer, had been watching Andrew Tate videos immediately prior to murdering his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, her mother Carol and sister Hannah. Does she understand why Tate’s content – which is available on multiple platforms – is avidly consumed by so many young men?

“I’m certainly not an admirer of Tate,” Sinéad concludes. “I just think it’s really sad that we’re seeing this wedge being driven between young men and young women at the moment. We saw it in the German elections last week with the left direction of voting for young women versus the very right direction of young men. There’s a lot of grooming and exploitation that’s happening to bring young men into this thinking. If there’s a kernel of frustration or dissatisfaction in younger men, it’s probably coming from the progression of women’s rights.

“As that expression of feminism is evolving, people like Andrew Tate are tapping into it and pushing this version of masculinity that is so toxic, so misogynistic and aims to push us back decades.”