Some pretty outstanding work put in by Naomi O’Leary here, which adds a lot more depth to the posts on r/ireland of some of Daly’s and Wallace’s speeches over in the EU Parliament.
> In China, Mick Wallace has become so familiar to viewers he has a nickname: Golden Lion King. It’s a reference to 謝遜, a wild haired character from a popular book and TV series who defends the protagonist. It’s because Wallace has “spoken up for China many times” Sina reported.
And now they cross over to flat out dangerous. Used by the CCP as propaganda tools to justify committing more human rights abuses, because these two sound bodied people in neutral Ireland think like this.
Article below. It’s split between 3 comments due to the length. I’m sharing it as it’s very important for people to read but please buy the newspaper to support the work they’ve done.
—————————————
When Dublin MEP Clare Daly stood up to denounce sanctions on Russia last week in the European Parliament and say that the EU’s response makes her “absolutely sick”, within a day the clip was being played on Russian state television.
The speech was broadcast on the country’s two most popular channels, the state-controlled Rossiya-1 and Channel One, where a presenter and a guest discussed it as evidence that western politicians were coming around to the Kremlin point of view on the Ukraine invasion.
“This is a very important precedent which suggests that many politicians in Europe don’t want to participate in this information campaign which demonises our country,” remarked the guest, Nikita Danyuk of a Russian strategic studies institute.
It’s an example of how Daly and her close political ally Mick Wallace have become staples of state-controlled media in the Russian, Chinese, and Arabic languages since they were elected to the European Parliament, coverage in which they are presented as important international figures who confirm regime positions.
A 10-month investigation by The Irish Times to track the international footprint of the two MEPs has revealed their outsized profile in the state-controlled media operations of various authoritarian regimes.
While their activities may not always make waves in their own home constituencies of Dublin and Ireland South, in the past year their mere tweets have repeatedly made headlines internationally, from Russia Today to Iranian state news.
Their speeches have gone viral multiple times in China, boosted by Chinese government officials: since the invasion of Ukraine, speeches by Daly in the European Parliament have been posted at least four times by official Chinese foreign ministry accounts on Twitter.
Since January 2021 the two have received far more coverage in Chinese-language media than Ireland’s top political leaders or even Irish celebrities and sports stars like Conor McGregor and Rory McIlroy, according to news database LexisNexis, becoming so familiar to viewers that Wallace was given a nickname in Chinese: “Golden Lion King.”
Last month the two appeared in a very different place: in Lithuania, where they travelled to meet and speak in support of a man convicted of spying for Russia – even appearing on his chat show.
Supporting the spy
In November 2021, the two travelled to Lithuania to join a handful of people to protest in support of Algirdas Paleckis, a former Lithuanian politician who is appealing a conviction of spying for Russia.
The small demonstration and the MEPs’ attendance was covered by Russian state-controlled Sputnik news and by the pro-Kremlin EADaily and RusDnepr sites, which present Paleckis as a dissident persecuted by the West.
The scion of a well-known political family whose grandfather is associated with the induction of Lithuania into the Soviet Union, Paleckis was once a mainstream MP who became increasingly isolated in his political views over time and is known as a critic of Lithuania’s membership of the European Union and Nato.
His quick repayment of a mortgage raised the suspicion of authorities, and, following an investigation, in July Paleckis was convicted of collecting information for Russian intelligence services in return for money and other benefits, after a businessman who was also on trial pleaded guilty and turned witness against him, Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT reported.
An attempt to reach Paleckis for comment was not answered, but he has denied wrongdoing and maintained he was gathering information as part of a journalistic investigation.
Three weeks into the invasion of Ukraine, on March 16th Daly and Wallace returned to Lithuania to attend court as Paleckis’s appeal was being heard.
In a video distributed by fringe pro-Kremlin Lithuanian media, Daly and Wallace stood alongside the convicted spy, making statements condemning the conviction.
Daly called the case “frightening” and said there had been no evidence, while Wallace questioned whether Lithuania was following the rule of law.
The Irish MEPs also joined Paleckis as guests on a YouTube chat show that he hosts. On the show, Daly told Paleckis his case was “reminiscent of the worst of times in Northern Ireland” and “part of a bigger clampdown on differing views and dissenting voices”.
“What is being unleashed is a really dangerous Russiaphobia, which was under way anyway, but it’s now accelerating and Russian children are being targeted in European communities,” she added.
As the Lithuanian translated for his viewers, Wallace told Paleckis that “this conflict in Ukraine is being used to silence dissent”.
“If we want peace, we should dissolve Nato,” Wallace said.
Lithuanian politicians contacted by The Irish Times were surprised to hear that Wallace and Daly even knew about the case, which they described as a marginal event with little public purchase even within Lithuania.
“It’s such a local story, with no meaning for the average Irish man on the street. It’s like a traffic accident that happened in a province of the Democratic Republic of [the] Congo, ” marvelled Petras Austrevicius, a liberal Lithuanian MEP.
“Those two Irish people are absolutely involved on the wrong side of history,” he added. “Keep them in Ireland.”
How did the case come to their attention?
Ally MEP
A likely clue is an MEP from Latvia, Tatjana Zdanoka, who Daly and Wallace have joined for political events and demonstrations four times since September.
At the time of Latvia’s struggle for independence Zdanoka advocated for it remaining in the Soviet Union. She has been banned from running for national office on the grounds that she was a member of the Communist Party of Latvia after the country declared independence, at a time when the Latvian state considers the party to have backed an attempted Soviet coup to overthrow the new government.
Zdanoka unsuccessfully challenged this ban in the European Court of Human Rights, but first won election to the European Parliament in 2004, backed by a support base in Latvia’s ethnic Russian minority, which constitutes about one-quarter of its population.
In September, Zdanoka’s Latvian Russian Union issued a statement in Russian to say Daly and Wallace had taken part in an online seminar about “politically motivated persecution in the Baltic states”, providing sympathetic statements from the Irish MEPs on the issue. Wallace thanked Zdanoka for bringing the Paleckis case to his attention, the statement read.
When they first visited Lithuania to take part in the pro-Paleckis demonstration in November, Zdanoka was at their side, as she was again when they returned for his March court hearing.
Eight days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Daly and Wallace joined the Latvian MEP for a protest again.
The three donned T-shirts bearing the slogan “stop killing Donbas children”, and posed together in the European Parliament for photographs shared on Zdanoka’s Facebook page.
The accusation that Ukrainian forces have killed children in the eastern region has been a central part of Moscow’s justification for invading its neighbour, reflected in the slogan “for the children”, which was written on a Russian missile used to strike Ukraine’s Kramatorsk train station in a recent attack that killed dozens of evacuating civilians.
Zdanoka’s protest about the issue was widely covered in pro-Kremlin media, particularly as she was reprimanded for breaking parliamentary rules that day for holding up a related poster in the EU chamber. She did not respond to a request for comment.
Nils Usakovs, a senior Latvian Social Democrat politician who is the former mayor of Riga, told The Irish Times it was not correct to describe his fellow MEP Zdanoka as “pro-Russian”. Rather, she represents a particular subsection of the ethnic Russian electorate, he explained.
“I myself am ethnic Russian, and the majority of my voters come from the Russian-speaking community,” Usakovs said. “She’s regarded as a representative of the Russian Federation, of the Kremlin.”
Usakovs said he could understand the political activities of Zdanoka because they reflected her electorate. But the actions of Wallace and Daly puzzled him.
“She has a certain amount of Russian-speaking voters who elect her. You may like it, you may not, but she acts rationally because it’s about her voters,” Usakovs said.
“But I’m not sure that you’ve got that many pro-Russian-minded voters in Ireland. So for me, I don’t really understand the logic of these MEPs. But everything I’ve heard from these MEPs, in committees, in the hemicycle, is the same as what you hear from Zdanoka.”
I’ve posted the article in its entirety below but given the length, I found the following especially worth reading
>Daly did not respond when approached for comment about the contents of this article outside the voting chamber of the European Parliament. When asked specifically whether she stood by her praise of the PMF, she did not respond, and walked away.
Wallace said “No thanks”, and subsequently remained silent other than to occasionally laugh in response to questions.
The MEPs then called security and requested the Irish Times reporter be barred from European Parliament, this newspaper was informed. The reporter currently remains accredited with access to the parliament.
The two MEPs did not respond to follow-up calls and emails.
Daly and Wallace have a growing reputation among Irish journalists as combative figures to cover, who use complaints and the implied threat of legal action to quash reporting.
This week the MEPs both separately lodged High Court proceedings against the broadcaster RTÉ concerning alleged defamation. The details of what it regards have not been released.
A report on RTÉ’s Drivetime programme about their activities in the European Parliament was pulled from public access following a complaint last year.
Also this:
>Prominent foreigners who support regime points of view are highly valued by authoritarian regimes for internal propaganda purposes, analysts of Russian and Chinese media told The Irish Times.
It is difficult for fringe figures to gain prominence in authoritarian societies that enforce conformity. So to an audience within such a country, someone with an important title like Member of the European Parliament is assumed to represent influential and authoritative views.
“It’s impressive when they are watching TV and see a foreign politician and they are repeating these narratives of propaganda – it’s impressive for a Russian audience,” said Viktor Denisenko, an associate professor at Vilnius University specialising in media coverage.
“They do not know how popular these politicians are in their own countries. They are presented as very important.”
Wallace and Daly are among various western figures who get featured on Russian and Chinese state media. In Russia, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson is particularly popular for his criticisms of Nato and view that Russia is acting in self-defence in Ukraine, a view widely dismissed in the West. (A memo from the Kremlin’s information department telling friendly Russian media outlets to feature him “as much as possible” was leaked to the US magazine Mother Jones.)
Beijing highly appreciates praise from abroad and pays online influencers to post pro-China content, according to investigations by the London Times and New York Times, something the Chinese government denies. There is no suggestion that has happened in the case of Wallace and Daly.
The value of Daly and Wallace for the Chinese government lies in their European Parliament titles rather than the fact that they are Irish, according to Wu Min Hsuan, CEO of Taiwan-based nonprofit organisation Doublethink Lab, which monitors Chinese state media.
“I personally don’t think that they are quoting those people because they are Irish. The most important [thing] is that they are a European Union MP. If you look, every quotation is about the European Union. They try to use this voice to depict an alternative universe within China where even the West doesn’t agree with [what US president Joe] Biden or Nato are doing,” he said.
Excellent article. And quite unsettling. Is an intense dislike of American imperialism motivating them to go in this direction or are there certain other incentives for them? Dalys comment on the Iraqi militia being “inclusive” took the biscuit.
Are they taking money or are they just brainwashed?
In what they say, they are not even consistent from the start of one sentence to the end of the next. They are best understood as a cult, perhaps.
Insufferable cnuts
Fantastic bit of journalism showing exactly how dangerous people like this can be.
Queen & Portishead tribute band?
Ugh paywall
Is there any way we can stop them (mis) representing us? Looks like a five year term from 2019!? I can only imagine the damage they’ll have done by 2024.
Jaysus. I honestly had no idea how many different times they put their foot in it.
Absolutely c**ts but it’s important to let idiots like this speak their mind openly otherwise they will disappear underground and eventually you end up with a party like UKIP. Let them speak as it keeps the rest of us on our toes and alert.
Wow, I knew they were a shady duo but I had no idea how deep their alignments to Russia and China were. Even people in other countries are getting suspicious of them and why they’re showing up supporting local controversial figures.
They absolutely don’t want Irish media sniffing around them, their legal cases against RTE is one thing but trying to get an Irish journalist barred from the European Parliament after being asked questions is an incredibly bad look.
They’re a fucking dangerous pair and the next two years with them is going to be painful.
Terrible stuff. But I DO agree with her first point – why all this reaching out to the people of Ukraine when people in Syria and elsewhere are being ignored. It’s hard to get past that.
The rest of it is dangerous nonsense.
There was one “socialist” calling it a smear job in the replies to Gavan Reilly’s tweet on it. He had 10 likes on the tweet but 150k followers… very organic ratio there
Naomi O’Leary is obsessed with these two. Does she even write about other subjects any more?
Essentially, the majority of the article cites that they have been reported in the news of many ‘enemy’ countries. That doesn’t affect the integrity of Daly/Wallace or a single thing they say.
Some criticism of other bits of the IT article:
Algirdas Paleckis has been smeared and persecuted as a spy, with no evidence against him – same type of stitch up as Julian Assange and various other whistleblowers have had to deal with.
**The IT is directly reporting him as a spy** – even though his conviction is _exactly_ the kind of thing that threatens journalism itself.
So that is the IT directly supporting a government narrative and actions, aimed at attacking journalism in another EU country.
On Clare/Wallace’s praise of Soleimani/Muhandis: **It was for fighting against ISIS/Al-Qaeda, and being illegally assainated in the same drone strike.**
Remember them? The latter being the bad guys who destroy the Twin Towers, leading to Afghanistan/Iraq wars? _Who the US was later funding as allies at the time of this assasination._
That is a massive and important bit of context for the IT to leave out of the story. That doesn’t make Soleimani/Muhandis ‘good guys’ – it is not smart for Daly/Wallace to not have qualified that, though the smear campaign right now makes it impossible for them to – there are no ‘good guys’ in that war, and it does not translate into wider support of PMF and any atrocities.
> “How is the National Endowment for Democracy working to help?”
> […] We help groups such as the Doublethink Lab in Taipei and Proekt in Moscow, which has exposed Russian interference in elections in Africa and Latin America, as well as a group called the Insider, which focuses on Russian interference in Europe.
Wallace’s statement about dissolving NATO is pretty moot, now. It’s not really contestable anymore, that Eastern European non-NATO countries are at risk of invasion.
His statement “Taiwan is a part of China” is extremely ignorant/stupid as well. Even if he’s just trying to make a semantic historical point with that,
it’s absolutely wrong to support the undemocratic takeover of Taiwan by China – Taiwan very clear doesn’t want to be a part of China, and Chinese expansionism could threaten all of SE Asia
(there are no NATO/EU borders in SE Asia, to limit advances, if China was appeased and became aggressive like that).
I agree with his anti-war stance, but there’s plenty of other stuff I don’t agree with from him (and won’t be forgetting the 2013 tax shenanigans…).
The most damning thing about Wallace and Daly is comparing their records representing Irish people interests with their records of grandstanding about EU/US/NATO foreign policy.
In 2020, an investigative journalist infiltrated a pro-Kremlin network by pretending to be a Russian intelligence officer, “Ivan”. He convinced a member of the network, the [Working Group on Syria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Group_on_Syria,_Propaganda_and_Media#Controversies), Paul McKeigue, to reveal its inner workings and its relationship with its Kremlin handlers.
I’m my opinion they have Kremlin handers, in the Irish or another embassy.
Canadian here never heard of Daly till I saw that video of her very angry speech in euro parliament?
Would not want to get on the wrong side of her
Wowzers, this is some seriously dodgy journalism. Funny how people on Reddit will be scathing of the media’s smears and questionable sources until it supports their ideological POV, then the piece is great.
Its pretty staggering to watch in real time the character assassination of a left wing woman and not just one from history books. Even more impressive is the uniform opposition to any other perspective in the r/ireland sub. Insane. Que the downvotes 😅
They represent a view shared by some on the far left, that the origin of all woe and strife is the West, and all you have to do is to go back far enough to find the root cause. Most people grow out of this ideology before they leave university, but, they are entitled to it and should be debated, not shouted down.
The best thing about them though, is that their existence belies their beliefs. In Russia, the Government may well poison them, in Syria, they might be strangled in a prison cell, in China, they might disappear to be re-educated.
In Ireland, they can get a cushy job because people want to annoy the Government of the day. All they have to do is get a bit angry and emotional and a certain amount of Irish people will go … Jaysus, fair play.
Off topic but I always laugh at that photo of the pair of them. Like a true crime documentary where the narrator is like “they seemed like an ordinary couple…
…BUT THEY WERE ANYTHING BUT”.
Two absolute bellends. State of both of them.
He’s watery soup and is getting rode next election just ask wexford
30 comments
Some pretty outstanding work put in by Naomi O’Leary here, which adds a lot more depth to the posts on r/ireland of some of Daly’s and Wallace’s speeches over in the EU Parliament.
What’s telling is the last couple of paragraphs: https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1515238582117666820
> In China, Mick Wallace has become so familiar to viewers he has a nickname: Golden Lion King. It’s a reference to 謝遜, a wild haired character from a popular book and TV series who defends the protagonist. It’s because Wallace has “spoken up for China many times” Sina reported.
And now they cross over to flat out dangerous. Used by the CCP as propaganda tools to justify committing more human rights abuses, because these two sound bodied people in neutral Ireland think like this.
Article below. It’s split between 3 comments due to the length. I’m sharing it as it’s very important for people to read but please buy the newspaper to support the work they’ve done.
—————————————
When Dublin MEP Clare Daly stood up to denounce sanctions on Russia last week in the European Parliament and say that the EU’s response makes her “absolutely sick”, within a day the clip was being played on Russian state television.
The speech was broadcast on the country’s two most popular channels, the state-controlled Rossiya-1 and Channel One, where a presenter and a guest discussed it as evidence that western politicians were coming around to the Kremlin point of view on the Ukraine invasion.
“This is a very important precedent which suggests that many politicians in Europe don’t want to participate in this information campaign which demonises our country,” remarked the guest, Nikita Danyuk of a Russian strategic studies institute.
It’s an example of how Daly and her close political ally Mick Wallace have become staples of state-controlled media in the Russian, Chinese, and Arabic languages since they were elected to the European Parliament, coverage in which they are presented as important international figures who confirm regime positions.
A 10-month investigation by The Irish Times to track the international footprint of the two MEPs has revealed their outsized profile in the state-controlled media operations of various authoritarian regimes.
While their activities may not always make waves in their own home constituencies of Dublin and Ireland South, in the past year their mere tweets have repeatedly made headlines internationally, from Russia Today to Iranian state news.
Their speeches have gone viral multiple times in China, boosted by Chinese government officials: since the invasion of Ukraine, speeches by Daly in the European Parliament have been posted at least four times by official Chinese foreign ministry accounts on Twitter.
Since January 2021 the two have received far more coverage in Chinese-language media than Ireland’s top political leaders or even Irish celebrities and sports stars like Conor McGregor and Rory McIlroy, according to news database LexisNexis, becoming so familiar to viewers that Wallace was given a nickname in Chinese: “Golden Lion King.”
Last month the two appeared in a very different place: in Lithuania, where they travelled to meet and speak in support of a man convicted of spying for Russia – even appearing on his chat show.
Supporting the spy
In November 2021, the two travelled to Lithuania to join a handful of people to protest in support of Algirdas Paleckis, a former Lithuanian politician who is appealing a conviction of spying for Russia.
The small demonstration and the MEPs’ attendance was covered by Russian state-controlled Sputnik news and by the pro-Kremlin EADaily and RusDnepr sites, which present Paleckis as a dissident persecuted by the West.
The scion of a well-known political family whose grandfather is associated with the induction of Lithuania into the Soviet Union, Paleckis was once a mainstream MP who became increasingly isolated in his political views over time and is known as a critic of Lithuania’s membership of the European Union and Nato.
His quick repayment of a mortgage raised the suspicion of authorities, and, following an investigation, in July Paleckis was convicted of collecting information for Russian intelligence services in return for money and other benefits, after a businessman who was also on trial pleaded guilty and turned witness against him, Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT reported.
An attempt to reach Paleckis for comment was not answered, but he has denied wrongdoing and maintained he was gathering information as part of a journalistic investigation.
Three weeks into the invasion of Ukraine, on March 16th Daly and Wallace returned to Lithuania to attend court as Paleckis’s appeal was being heard.
In a video distributed by fringe pro-Kremlin Lithuanian media, Daly and Wallace stood alongside the convicted spy, making statements condemning the conviction.
Daly called the case “frightening” and said there had been no evidence, while Wallace questioned whether Lithuania was following the rule of law.
The Irish MEPs also joined Paleckis as guests on a YouTube chat show that he hosts. On the show, Daly told Paleckis his case was “reminiscent of the worst of times in Northern Ireland” and “part of a bigger clampdown on differing views and dissenting voices”.
“What is being unleashed is a really dangerous Russiaphobia, which was under way anyway, but it’s now accelerating and Russian children are being targeted in European communities,” she added.
As the Lithuanian translated for his viewers, Wallace told Paleckis that “this conflict in Ukraine is being used to silence dissent”.
“If we want peace, we should dissolve Nato,” Wallace said.
Lithuanian politicians contacted by The Irish Times were surprised to hear that Wallace and Daly even knew about the case, which they described as a marginal event with little public purchase even within Lithuania.
“It’s such a local story, with no meaning for the average Irish man on the street. It’s like a traffic accident that happened in a province of the Democratic Republic of [the] Congo, ” marvelled Petras Austrevicius, a liberal Lithuanian MEP.
“Those two Irish people are absolutely involved on the wrong side of history,” he added. “Keep them in Ireland.”
How did the case come to their attention?
Ally MEP
A likely clue is an MEP from Latvia, Tatjana Zdanoka, who Daly and Wallace have joined for political events and demonstrations four times since September.
At the time of Latvia’s struggle for independence Zdanoka advocated for it remaining in the Soviet Union. She has been banned from running for national office on the grounds that she was a member of the Communist Party of Latvia after the country declared independence, at a time when the Latvian state considers the party to have backed an attempted Soviet coup to overthrow the new government.
Zdanoka unsuccessfully challenged this ban in the European Court of Human Rights, but first won election to the European Parliament in 2004, backed by a support base in Latvia’s ethnic Russian minority, which constitutes about one-quarter of its population.
In September, Zdanoka’s Latvian Russian Union issued a statement in Russian to say Daly and Wallace had taken part in an online seminar about “politically motivated persecution in the Baltic states”, providing sympathetic statements from the Irish MEPs on the issue. Wallace thanked Zdanoka for bringing the Paleckis case to his attention, the statement read.
When they first visited Lithuania to take part in the pro-Paleckis demonstration in November, Zdanoka was at their side, as she was again when they returned for his March court hearing.
Eight days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Daly and Wallace joined the Latvian MEP for a protest again.
The three donned T-shirts bearing the slogan “stop killing Donbas children”, and posed together in the European Parliament for photographs shared on Zdanoka’s Facebook page.
The accusation that Ukrainian forces have killed children in the eastern region has been a central part of Moscow’s justification for invading its neighbour, reflected in the slogan “for the children”, which was written on a Russian missile used to strike Ukraine’s Kramatorsk train station in a recent attack that killed dozens of evacuating civilians.
Zdanoka’s protest about the issue was widely covered in pro-Kremlin media, particularly as she was reprimanded for breaking parliamentary rules that day for holding up a related poster in the EU chamber. She did not respond to a request for comment.
Nils Usakovs, a senior Latvian Social Democrat politician who is the former mayor of Riga, told The Irish Times it was not correct to describe his fellow MEP Zdanoka as “pro-Russian”. Rather, she represents a particular subsection of the ethnic Russian electorate, he explained.
“I myself am ethnic Russian, and the majority of my voters come from the Russian-speaking community,” Usakovs said. “She’s regarded as a representative of the Russian Federation, of the Kremlin.”
Usakovs said he could understand the political activities of Zdanoka because they reflected her electorate. But the actions of Wallace and Daly puzzled him.
“She has a certain amount of Russian-speaking voters who elect her. You may like it, you may not, but she acts rationally because it’s about her voters,” Usakovs said.
“But I’m not sure that you’ve got that many pro-Russian-minded voters in Ireland. So for me, I don’t really understand the logic of these MEPs. But everything I’ve heard from these MEPs, in committees, in the hemicycle, is the same as what you hear from Zdanoka.”
I’ve posted the article in its entirety below but given the length, I found the following especially worth reading
>Daly did not respond when approached for comment about the contents of this article outside the voting chamber of the European Parliament. When asked specifically whether she stood by her praise of the PMF, she did not respond, and walked away.
Wallace said “No thanks”, and subsequently remained silent other than to occasionally laugh in response to questions.
The MEPs then called security and requested the Irish Times reporter be barred from European Parliament, this newspaper was informed. The reporter currently remains accredited with access to the parliament.
The two MEPs did not respond to follow-up calls and emails.
Daly and Wallace have a growing reputation among Irish journalists as combative figures to cover, who use complaints and the implied threat of legal action to quash reporting.
This week the MEPs both separately lodged High Court proceedings against the broadcaster RTÉ concerning alleged defamation. The details of what it regards have not been released.
A report on RTÉ’s Drivetime programme about their activities in the European Parliament was pulled from public access following a complaint last year.
Also this:
>Prominent foreigners who support regime points of view are highly valued by authoritarian regimes for internal propaganda purposes, analysts of Russian and Chinese media told The Irish Times.
It is difficult for fringe figures to gain prominence in authoritarian societies that enforce conformity. So to an audience within such a country, someone with an important title like Member of the European Parliament is assumed to represent influential and authoritative views.
“It’s impressive when they are watching TV and see a foreign politician and they are repeating these narratives of propaganda – it’s impressive for a Russian audience,” said Viktor Denisenko, an associate professor at Vilnius University specialising in media coverage.
“They do not know how popular these politicians are in their own countries. They are presented as very important.”
Wallace and Daly are among various western figures who get featured on Russian and Chinese state media. In Russia, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson is particularly popular for his criticisms of Nato and view that Russia is acting in self-defence in Ukraine, a view widely dismissed in the West. (A memo from the Kremlin’s information department telling friendly Russian media outlets to feature him “as much as possible” was leaked to the US magazine Mother Jones.)
Beijing highly appreciates praise from abroad and pays online influencers to post pro-China content, according to investigations by the London Times and New York Times, something the Chinese government denies. There is no suggestion that has happened in the case of Wallace and Daly.
The value of Daly and Wallace for the Chinese government lies in their European Parliament titles rather than the fact that they are Irish, according to Wu Min Hsuan, CEO of Taiwan-based nonprofit organisation Doublethink Lab, which monitors Chinese state media.
“I personally don’t think that they are quoting those people because they are Irish. The most important [thing] is that they are a European Union MP. If you look, every quotation is about the European Union. They try to use this voice to depict an alternative universe within China where even the West doesn’t agree with [what US president Joe] Biden or Nato are doing,” he said.
Excellent article. And quite unsettling. Is an intense dislike of American imperialism motivating them to go in this direction or are there certain other incentives for them? Dalys comment on the Iraqi militia being “inclusive” took the biscuit.
Are they taking money or are they just brainwashed?
In what they say, they are not even consistent from the start of one sentence to the end of the next. They are best understood as a cult, perhaps.
Insufferable cnuts
Fantastic bit of journalism showing exactly how dangerous people like this can be.
Queen & Portishead tribute band?
Ugh paywall
Is there any way we can stop them (mis) representing us? Looks like a five year term from 2019!? I can only imagine the damage they’ll have done by 2024.
Jaysus. I honestly had no idea how many different times they put their foot in it.
Absolutely c**ts but it’s important to let idiots like this speak their mind openly otherwise they will disappear underground and eventually you end up with a party like UKIP. Let them speak as it keeps the rest of us on our toes and alert.
Wow, I knew they were a shady duo but I had no idea how deep their alignments to Russia and China were. Even people in other countries are getting suspicious of them and why they’re showing up supporting local controversial figures.
They absolutely don’t want Irish media sniffing around them, their legal cases against RTE is one thing but trying to get an Irish journalist barred from the European Parliament after being asked questions is an incredibly bad look.
They’re a fucking dangerous pair and the next two years with them is going to be painful.
Terrible stuff. But I DO agree with her first point – why all this reaching out to the people of Ukraine when people in Syria and elsewhere are being ignored. It’s hard to get past that.
The rest of it is dangerous nonsense.
There was one “socialist” calling it a smear job in the replies to Gavan Reilly’s tweet on it. He had 10 likes on the tweet but 150k followers… very organic ratio there
Naomi O’Leary is obsessed with these two. Does she even write about other subjects any more?
Essentially, the majority of the article cites that they have been reported in the news of many ‘enemy’ countries. That doesn’t affect the integrity of Daly/Wallace or a single thing they say.
Some criticism of other bits of the IT article:
Algirdas Paleckis has been smeared and persecuted as a spy, with no evidence against him – same type of stitch up as Julian Assange and various other whistleblowers have had to deal with.
**The IT is directly reporting him as a spy** – even though his conviction is _exactly_ the kind of thing that threatens journalism itself.
So that is the IT directly supporting a government narrative and actions, aimed at attacking journalism in another EU country.
On Navalny’s racism – the IT didn’t contest that, but just to [back it up anyway](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56181084).
On Clare/Wallace’s praise of Soleimani/Muhandis: **It was for fighting against ISIS/Al-Qaeda, and being illegally assainated in the same drone strike.**
Remember them? The latter being the bad guys who destroy the Twin Towers, leading to Afghanistan/Iraq wars? _Who the US was later funding as allies at the time of this assasination._
That is a massive and important bit of context for the IT to leave out of the story. That doesn’t make Soleimani/Muhandis ‘good guys’ – it is not smart for Daly/Wallace to not have qualified that, though the smear campaign right now makes it impossible for them to – there are no ‘good guys’ in that war, and it does not translate into wider support of PMF and any atrocities.
**The Irish Times cites Doublethink Lab to back up its article – who [work adjacent to the National Endowment for Democracy](https://www.globalgovernanceproject.org/the-whole-story-2/) CIA linked propaganda organization.**
> “How is the National Endowment for Democracy working to help?”
> […] We help groups such as the Doublethink Lab in Taipei and Proekt in Moscow, which has exposed Russian interference in elections in Africa and Latin America, as well as a group called the Insider, which focuses on Russian interference in Europe.
Wallace’s statement about dissolving NATO is pretty moot, now. It’s not really contestable anymore, that Eastern European non-NATO countries are at risk of invasion.
His statement “Taiwan is a part of China” is extremely ignorant/stupid as well. Even if he’s just trying to make a semantic historical point with that,
it’s absolutely wrong to support the undemocratic takeover of Taiwan by China – Taiwan very clear doesn’t want to be a part of China, and Chinese expansionism could threaten all of SE Asia
(there are no NATO/EU borders in SE Asia, to limit advances, if China was appeased and became aggressive like that).
I agree with his anti-war stance, but there’s plenty of other stuff I don’t agree with from him (and won’t be forgetting the 2013 tax shenanigans…).
The most damning thing about Wallace and Daly is comparing their records representing Irish people interests with their records of grandstanding about EU/US/NATO foreign policy.
Is there any way we can recall MEPs?
https://i.imgur.com/VAqDOhl.jpg
In 2020, an investigative journalist infiltrated a pro-Kremlin network by pretending to be a Russian intelligence officer, “Ivan”. He convinced a member of the network, the [Working Group on Syria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Group_on_Syria,_Propaganda_and_Media#Controversies), Paul McKeigue, to reveal its inner workings and its relationship with its Kremlin handlers.
Here’s the article…
[How an Email Sting Operation Unearthed a pro-Assad Conspiracy—and Russia’s Role In It](https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/how-an-email-sting-operation-unearthed-a-pro-assad-conspiracy-and-russias-role-in-it/)
I’m my opinion they have Kremlin handers, in the Irish or another embassy.
Canadian here never heard of Daly till I saw that video of her very angry speech in euro parliament?
Would not want to get on the wrong side of her
Wowzers, this is some seriously dodgy journalism. Funny how people on Reddit will be scathing of the media’s smears and questionable sources until it supports their ideological POV, then the piece is great.
Its pretty staggering to watch in real time the character assassination of a left wing woman and not just one from history books. Even more impressive is the uniform opposition to any other perspective in the r/ireland sub. Insane. Que the downvotes 😅
They represent a view shared by some on the far left, that the origin of all woe and strife is the West, and all you have to do is to go back far enough to find the root cause. Most people grow out of this ideology before they leave university, but, they are entitled to it and should be debated, not shouted down.
The best thing about them though, is that their existence belies their beliefs. In Russia, the Government may well poison them, in Syria, they might be strangled in a prison cell, in China, they might disappear to be re-educated.
In Ireland, they can get a cushy job because people want to annoy the Government of the day. All they have to do is get a bit angry and emotional and a certain amount of Irish people will go … Jaysus, fair play.
Off topic but I always laugh at that photo of the pair of them. Like a true crime documentary where the narrator is like “they seemed like an ordinary couple…
…BUT THEY WERE ANYTHING BUT”.
Two absolute bellends. State of both of them.
He’s watery soup and is getting rode next election just ask wexford
Who voted these 2 in?
They are a disgrace to our country