AT THE OUTSET of any new year, many of us hope for a clean slate of some kind. A sense that whatever was unstable about the year gone by can be made stable, that an equilibrium can be found. 

Good luck with that. 

You know that phenomenon that happens with journalists and columnists sometimes, where you start to get the sense that an over-exposure to the news has sent them around the twist? And now you’re sort of just watching their steady descent into madness until they end up roaming the streets with their phones out, live-streaming themselves having allergic reactions to 5G masts? Well, if that ever happens to me, just know that this was the week when I really started losing it. 

Within the first week of 2026, the United States had kidnapped a world leader from his home and nakedly stated its intention to requisition that country’s oil. So Iraq, but without the foreplay. Nicolas Maduro is now being held in a New York prison while the US liberates its oil supply, leaving international law lying in a coffin that, by this point, is already 99% nail.

Days later, an agent of ICE, a 20,000-strong modern Gestapo force empowered to brutalise whomever they see fit across the United States, shot dead a woman named Renee Good for no discernible reason other than she was filming their activities on the streets of Minneapolis. In the aftermath, both Donald Trump and JD Vance have peddled debunked narratives that there was just cause for the shooting. US border patrol agents shot and injured a further two people in Portland in the days that followed.

Hunger strikers are dying in British prisons because they are being held as terrorists owing to their involvement with Palestine Action, at a time when Palestinians are still being killed by Israeli airstrikes under the pretence of a ceasefire.

In short, it is very hard to embody any kind of ‘new year, new me’ vibe when the world remains so unchangingly bleak. 

Irish government between a Grok and a hard place?

It is impossible to sort this nightmarish deluge of atrocities into a hierarchy, but one of the most concerning stories from the last week is one that the Irish government has sought to run away from rather than tackle with any sort of conviction. 

For the last week, Grok, (the generative AI tool built into Elon Musk’s digital platform X) has been used not only to create sexualised images of unconsenting women in order to harass them, it is also being used to generate sexualised imagery of children. 

Many of these exploitative images have a white supremacist bent, with users instructing Grok to nudify women (and children) or clothe them in bikinis that bear swastikas or Confederate flags.

Eliot Higgins of open source investigation organisation Bellingcat reported seeing one X user weaponise Grok to put the dead body of Renee Good in a bikini, referring to the act quite aptly as ‘digital corpse desecration’. The controversy has seen the Grok app leap to the top of the Irish app download charts, because we live in a world full of monstrous people who delight in doing monstrous things. Why the app is even allowed to remain on the Apple App Store given its flagrant violations of their terms of service is a mystery (for ‘a mystery’ please read ‘easily explained by a combination of greed, cowardice and utter moral bankruptcy’). 

This phenomenon has been widely observed and reported, and civil society groups such as the Irish Civil Liberties Council, the Rape Crisis Centre and more have pleaded with the Irish government or An Garda Síochána to intervene. The government has refused, with media minister Patrick O’Donovan even saying: “It’s people using the app that’s making the images.”

Are we to understand, then, that the Irish government is washing its hands of the matter? That Elon Musk can flash his ‘richest man in the world’ badge and all of a sudden an utter scourge like the production of sexualised images of children, or nudified images of other unconsenting people, is no longer a problem? 

“The technological advancements that are being made by young people and people that are not so young is far faster than the way in which law can be able to respond,” O’Donovan said when speaking, in a horrifying and ironic twist, at the BT Young Scientist Awards. 

What is that supposed to mean? That the law is obsolete in the face of a white supremacist sexual exploitation material-generating machine? Ultimately, the decision has been left at the door of Elon Musk, and while some media outlets reported that the function to generate these kinds of images has been switched off, what has actually happened is that it has been moved behind a paywall. 

Of course, we don’t need new laws for this. The production of child abuse material is already extremely illegal. If anyone has used Grok to make such material, then they are in line to face serious criminal prosecution. Other AI tools like Gemini and ChatGPT do not allow the generation of images such as these, so X is either knowingly or negligently failing to prevent egregious and, in many cases, criminal behaviour.

Naturally, O’Donovan’s remarks were poorly received and the minister has since deleted his own X account, saying: “As minister for communications and minister for Media I just felt that if you’re on a platform where this is allowed, regardless of whether you’re paying for it or not, I just don’t feel comfortable with it.”

While feeling discomfort is better than feeling nothing, one might expect the minister of communications and media to be somewhere closer to scandalised, outraged, sickened to their core that people are now at risk of being abused in this way. Instead, we are settling for a mealy-mouthed expression of unease.

Am I going insane? Since when are our cabinet ministers so prepared to speak in defence of a company that is producing, and I cannot stress this enough, simulated images of child sex abuse on an unprecedented scale, with no sign of slowing down? Am I the one losing my mind? You can tell me if I am.

Are you feeling crazy yet?

What is so hard to tolerate about all of this is that if you look at this problem dead in the face and name it for what it is, then you are the one who ends up sounding crazy, because it is crazy. It’s crazy beyond belief. And somehow, the people who are put in office and paid so very handsomely to keep this society healthy and safe, are shamelessly running scared. Their cowardice is palpable in every failure to meaningfully condemn things which are absolutely wrong. Which, ten years ago, would have been rightly castigated as unthinkable.

Sometimes it sort of feels like after almost 800 years of fighting for freedom a decision was made upon the establishment of an independent Irish state that we would spend the rest of our existence capitulating to anyone who’s prepared to pay a corporate tax rate of a little over 10% (and sometimes we don’t even bother making them do that). 

The accounts of Irish government departments are not leaving X — where, by the way, Musk shared a post this week which featured the sentiment ‘white solidarity is the only way to survive’ — and Micheál Martin himself has gone to bat for the platform, saying: ‘Platforms can be misused and abused or they can be used for positive reasons as well.’ 

If you feel comfortable with any of this, you shouldn’t. If you’re not scared by it, then I think you’re pretending. I think you’re lying to yourself. I think that you know as well as I do that five years from now, things are going to be five years worse, unless action is taken at both a civil society and legislative level to constrain the wanton behaviour of those with money and power and vast technological resources. 

In this new, fast-paced world of artificial intelligence, you have no idea what they will take from you next. You have no idea what horrors will be visited upon you as punishment for resisting. And the position of the Irish government as of this week is, well, there’s no way you could possibly expect the law to help you. Are you crazy?

But hey, this week is also the anniversary of the man slipping on the ice! Remember that? The world as we knew it ended not long after, at some point that historians will presumably put their finger on someday, but there was a brief moment in time between that guy slipping and his arse hitting the cold pavement that things were alright.