FALSE CLAIMS THAT the public is being “left in the dark” about rapes and sexual assaults due to the government creating new laws that enforce “media blackouts” have spread online.

There are laws that forbid the media identifying suspects of rape and sexual assault until they are convicted, though these are not particularly new — they were first passed in 1981 and were extended by the Dáil in 2024, under the previous government.

Nevertheless, a video that misleadingly claims that crimes are not being reported in the media has been shared more than 340 times since being posted to Facebook on 13 September.

The video features a man lamenting a “recent upsurge in sexual assaults against women here in Ireland” saying that politicians have “enforced the media blackout on these assaults”.

He continues: “The government has passed new laws to ban media outlets from reporting on these horrors.”

It is unclear what laws he is referring to, but there have been no media blackouts stopping the reporting of sex crimes. 

A media blackout refers to the censorship of a certain topic by news organisations.

They are rarely used in Ireland. When they do occur, they are almost exclusively put in place for security reasons on foot of requests from gardaí, usually when they are responding to hostage situations or other incidents where there is a clear ongoing danger.

It is not certain that media outlets would comply with such requests when they do happen. Irish media outlets have their own internal processes for deciding which stories are covered each day and which ones aren’t.

Under Irish law, individuals accused of certain sexual offences cannot be publicly identified before a conviction. That would be illegal under the Criminal Law (Rape) Act 1981.

The version of this law that is currently enacted has a section called Anonymity of accused, which says: “After a person is charged with an applicable offence no matter likely to lead members of the public to identify him as the person against whom the charge is made shall be published or broadcast.”

The Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Human Trafficking) Act 2024 defines such “applicable offences” to include, among other crimes, “a sexual assault offence”.

In other words: media outlets cannot publish identifiable information about people charged in sexual assault cases.

That 2024 act expanded the blanket anonymity for suspects from rape cases to a wider range of sex crimes.

The law sets out that a person can be identified post-conviction as long as the anonymity of the victim is not compromised. 

However, there is another utterance in the Facebook video that indicates its creator is confusing this with how another law works. 

“Them laws, they’re not there to protect the Irish women,” he says. “They’re designed to protect the perpetrators of these horrific assaults, under the disguise of ‘international protection’.”

International protection refers to the system that processes the claims of asylum seekers, and a new law was recently passed relevant to that.

The International Protection Act 2026 commenced in June, aligning Ireland with the EU Migration and Asylum Act — a reform that was intended to strengthen Europe’s borders and coordinate how EU countries respond to asylum claims.

Further, this law does include reporting restrictions — but they are not new, and do not stop the media from publishing stories on sexual assaults.

Rather, there is a provision that reads: “A person shall not publish or broadcast [...] information likely to lead members of the public to identify that a person is an [International Protection] applicant without the consent of that person.”

However, this is simply updating an already existing law for the new legislation.

The International Protection Act 2015 uses almost identical language forbidding the publication or broadcast of “information likely to lead members of the public to identify a person as an applicant”.

In other words, the law forbids identifying anyone as an asylum seeker.

It does not, however, prevent the reporting of sexual assaults. And given that the suspects accused of sexual assaults cannot be identified anyway, suspects who are asylum seekers are often described as such in news media.

Real reporting

So, what crimes does the man in the video think are not being reported? He only mentions one identifiable case in the video.

He references a real case in Galway in which two Jordanian men have been accused of the rape and false imprisonment of an 18-year-old woman in a car parked at Galway’s Ceannt Railway Station. They have been arrested and charged. 

This was not censored or hidden from the public.

The case was reported by major national publications, including the state broadcaster RTÉ.

The Journal’s coverage of the case explicitly identifies the suspects as Jordanian asylum seekers.

It should also be noted that there is little statistical evidence that there is a “recent upsurge in sexual assaults” in Ireland.

Figures from the Central Statistics Office only run up to the first quarter of this year. They show that sexual offences in general, and sexual assaults in particular, have been trending downward for years.

It is a common trope in fringe circles to portray the entire media as unreliable, delegitimising sources of information that contradict their own agendas.

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