Far right influencer Michael McCarthy knowingly and willfully uses his public platform to incite abuse and harrassment against others, and even to silence a journalist.
I can prove it because I’m the journalist he silenced, and I kept screenshots of our messages.
McCarthy, for the unfamiliar, is a deeply unpleasant social media personality from Loughrea, Co. Galway whose bread and butter is recording videos of himself reacting to videos, often people of colour, women and queer people he deems worthy of mockery and abuse. He has over a million followers on Instagram, which is mainly a testament to the appetite for petty online thuggery as entertainment. He has been the subject of multiple fact-checks by The Journal due to his constant spreading of misinformation, and is well-known for unleashing his mob of vicious fans on the targets of his ire. He has increasingly leveraged his online following into actual political activism: he was one of the organisers of the so-called “official” Spoil the Vote campaign during last year’s presidential election, and recently attended a “remigration” summit in Lisbon. “Remigration” is the trendy new term for “ethnic cleansing” among the far right.
Last October, when I was still on X, I saw someone ask who Michael McCarthy was in reply to a mutual follower of mine who’d posted about him without giving his name. I replied that he was “Michael McCarthy of X, Loughrea”, with “X” standing in for the name of the townland where he’s from. Before I get any further into the story, I want to be clear that I don’t think this was an okay thing to do. As I explained to Michael McCarthy later, it was a tossed-off joke playing on the Irish press convention of publishing the addresses of people charged in criminal proceedings. I say that not as justification for what I did, but precisely to condemn myself, because I actually think that Irish press convention is a bad thing and it’s worse that I did it as a joke to someone not charged with a crime.
I knew where he was from because he had registered it as his address in public filings for a company he started. I remembered it off-hand because I think of him as “Michael McCarthy of X, Loughrea, Co. Galway” as opposed to Michael McCarthy of X, Lismore, Co. Waterford, a completely different and much less successful far right activist who ran in the 2024 local elections on a platform of racial segregation.
I made that post on the evening of the 27th of October, and I woke up the next day to over a hundred threatening and abusive messages on my X and Instagram accounts. I had to read through quite a few before I figured out what had happened: someone had accused me of doxxing their parents. I was initially baffled, but after racking my brain, the realisation finally hit. Michael McCarthy still lived at home with his parents, and in posting where he lived, I had posted where they lived. Or, at least, the townland where they lived.
I went on McCarthy’s Instagram and sure enough, there I was in his Instagram stories.
“This person is doxxing the address of my parents.
Can people go report the account
Also if someone has information on who it is, can you reach out.
He is a member of @nujofficial, who I’ve emailed as it goes against their ethics.
I’ll also be filing a police report. If your a solicitor who deals with this sort of thing lmk. I might start a civil case as well.”
I immediately deleted the post, though not before taking a screenshot of the analytics in case he tried to claim I’d blasted the address to thousands of people. As you can see, it got barely more than 300 impressions, which includes anyone who scrolled past it without stopping to look at it. Fewer than fifty people actually clicked on the post in any way, only one person retweeted it, and since I deleted it, no one has mentioned the townland in relation to him anywhere on social media.
I then messaged Michael McCarthy on X to explain myself, sincerely apologise, and ask him to delete his Instagram stories. I could tolerate receiving abuse and threats directed solely at me, but many of the messages also threatened my family. By the same token I had deleted my X post in fairness to his parents (something Michael had never actually asked me to do, he just went straight to inciting abuse and harrassment against me and publicly threatening me with legal action), I asked he delete his stories in fairness to my family and after a bit of back and forth, he agreed on one condition: that I never post or speak about him again.
If I did, the abuse and threats would resume. That was not merely the implication: he explicitly said “it will go back to shit like today”.
Against every instinct I have, except the overwhelming instinct to protect my loved ones, I accepted his deal. He deleted his Instagram stories and posted a new one saying we had a chat and I was actually really nice about it, and thanking his followers for their “help”.
You can read the screenshots of our entire conversation here. The only edit I made was to remove McCarthy’s own reference to the townland he’s from.
You can read some of the abusive and threatening messages I received here. I didn’t put myself through reading and screenshotting all of them, but I thought it prudent to keep a representative sample, especially once I decided to delete my Instagram as I wasn’t very active on Instagram but received most of the abuse and threats there.
I don’t regret taking his deal in the moment. I needed to stop the situation escalating before my loved ones were targeted. I had barely more than two thousand followers at my peak on X, while McCarthy was broadcasting a signal to attack me to an audience of hundreds of thousands. The traffic on this blog spiked so much in just the hours his Instagram stories about me were up that it accounted for 10% of all people who visited last year. I needed to stem that tide, and I did what I had to do in the circumstances.
But I knew even then I would not be able to keep his deal in the long term. Not only because it compromises me as a journalist, but because I knew I could not in good conscience just sit on clear proof that when Michael McCarthy sics his followers on people – including on many people who aren’t public figures but merely had the audacity to share their views online – he knows exactly what he is doing. He knows he is causing them to receive abuse and threats and he does it deliberately.
Most people who use their social media platform to incite abuse and harrassment against people maintain plausible deniability by saying they can’t control what their followers do. They don’t admit to knowing they can, and do, turn the abuse and harrassment on and off like a switch.
But Michael McCarthy admitted it to me, and I feel a responsibility to expose him. He has caused so much misery to so many people, all for his own enrichment and aggrandisement. I have no illusions about this post stopping him – this is how he makes his money, after all – but at least now the proof is a matter of public record, and I can leave behind the guilt of keeping this information secret while he continues to harrass others far worse than he did me.
Left in the Lurch 