Carl Kinsella

“BAD NEWS FOR many people in County Wicklow today.” 

That was the caption chosen by Councillor Joe Behan on Tuesday for a TikTok video, following a vote by Wicklow County Council to approve a new Rents Scheme that will see rents go up for people in local authority housing as well as those on the private rental market. 

Unfortunately for Behan, a technical mishap with TikTok meant that the first minute of the three-minute video is largely inaudible underneath a swelling, swarming and profoundly horrifying musical accompaniment, beginning with a screech before giving way to a noise that sounds like an eldritch abomination emerging from the bottom of the sea after a thousand millennia of dreamless sleep, finally ready to drag humanity into the abyss. 

Many TikTok users got a laugh out of the video and took to the comment section to join in on the joke. Some of the highlights included:

• “A very ominous message, I don’t know what you said, but I’m scared Joe.”
• “Cheers Joe. I’m absolutely terrified now but I’ve no idea why. Keep it up.”
• “I’m literally shaking thanks for letting me know Joe.”
• “Thinking of you all in Wicklow, sounds frightening”

Speaking to The Journal this morning, Behan could see the funny side of his newfound virality, and explained how the video came to be. 

“I’m new to TikTok, I don’t have the experience of the TikTok Tánaiste when it comes to these things,” Behan said, referring to Simon Harris’ use of social media.

“Obviously some algorithm on TikTok produced this horror music. It must have been related to the first three words [of the caption]. So this musical accompaniment appears and I didn’t notice it until I posted it, and what I’ve discovered since is that you can’t edit the post once you’ve posted it to TikTok, so I was stuck.”

An ironic consequence of the video’s profoundly ominous soundtrack is that it has reached far more users than Behan’s previous content. The councillor, who first took his seat on Wicklow County Council in 1985 and had a four-year stint as a TD between 2007 and 2011, received a combined 18,000 views on his first two TikTok videos. Yesterday’s video has already amassed over a quarter of a million views. Very respectably, the video is still available to watch on the councillor’s TikTok account. 

Behan was eager to point out that the same video had been posted to his other social media channels without the horror movie score.  “It wasn’t done deliberately by any means. I certainly wouldn’t be trying to do it deliberately because I wouldn’t want to hide from the seriousness of the message that I’m putting across,” he said. 

“Obviously there was a lot of merriment and people having a laugh, but if people waited, the music dies down after the first minute and the point I’m making is that a lot of people renting in Wicklow are going to be hit with additional charges, particularly old age pensioners living in council houses, their rent is going to double.”

Despite yesterday’s snafu, Behan still sees the advantages of social media when it comes to communicating with the public. 

“It allows for an unfiltered message from you as a politician to the people,” he said. “When I first got elected 41 years ago, the only way the message went out from a meeting in Bray was in The Bray People the following week, we didn’t even have local radio in those early days.”

“It has shown me that TikTok is unforgiving if you make a mistake. I’ll have to get a few lessons from Simon Harris. He’s the pro. But every day is a schoolday.”