At Thursday evening’s monthly meeting of Belfast City Council, Ron McDowell—the deputy leader of the TUV and a man not usually known for public self-mockery—did something that stopped the chamber cold. He called himself “an old eejit.” It was a rare flash of humility in the middle of a fiercely tribal political argument, and it came only after days of ridicule over an AI-generated image he had shared on social media. The image, which appeared to show a vast loyalist crowd stretching across a Portadown car park, had been created or altered using artificial intelligence to make the numbers look like a four-figure gathering. In fact, the real rally supporting the Orangemen at Drumcree had drawn only a few hundred people. Persistent, seasoned politicians have learned to brush off mockery, but McDowell, attending the meeting remotely rather than sitting in his usual seat, could not simply let the moment pass. His voice, crackling through speakers, had a slightly sheepish edge as he admitted that his ill-advised post had caused real damage to the cause he holds dear. He did not try to spin his way out of it; he did not blame a rogue staffer or a misunderstanding of technology. He simply owned it, called himself a foolish old man, and then, almost in the same breath, asked everyone not to let his stupidity obscure what he insisted was a just and deeply supported campaign. It was a strange, human moment—one that exposed the gap between the polished performance of politics and the messy, sometimes embarrassing reality of being human in an age of deepfakes, filters, and viral falsehoods.
But the story of the AI image did not begin at the council meeting. It began earlier in the week, when tensions around Drumcree were already simmering. On Tuesday evening, over two hundred people had gathered in a car parkin Portadown to show solidarity with the Orangemen, who found themselves locked in another stand-off over whether they could march down the nationalist Garvaghy Road. It was a real event, with real passions, real flags, and real speeches. But when McDowell shared a picture of it on social media, he did not share the honest, modest image of a few hundred people standing in the cold. He shared an artificially swollen version—a picture that made the rally look like a vast sea of supporters, thousands strong, with no end to the crowd. When challenged, McDowell first insisted he had posted it for “entertainment,” a dismissive explanation that only raised more eyebrows. Then, in another post, he seemed to contradict himself, writing: “I really need to learn social media better. There’s no cure for stupid.” It was an admission that suggested he knew exactly how bad the mistake was, even if he could not quite bring himself to offer a full, unambiguous apology. Ironically, he stressed that the original photograph doing the rounds was actually one he had taken and released himself. “So I’ve nothing to hide,” he said, as though his willingness to share a manipulated image was somehow proof of his honesty. Then he turned his fire on the BBC, calling it “pathetic” for trying to “deflect” attention onto the fake image rather than focusing on the loyalist rally itself. Those comments did not extinguish the story; they poured petrol on it. Within hours, the saga was everywhere, and on social media users began creating a new wave of memes showing multiple Councillor McDowells sitting in the council chamber, superimposed into absurd scenes, multiplying him like an AI-generated hall of mirrors. The original rally, and the genuine anxieties of those who attended it, became increasingly difficult to see throughthe cloud of jokes and ridicule.
At the council meeting, Sinn Féin Councillor Ryan Murphy was clearly determined to keep the spotlight firmly on McDowell’s embarrassment. He raised the matter during a discussion about the council’s response to the Stormont consultation on the Northern Ireland Draft Artificial Intelligence Strategy—an appropriate, if slightly mischievous, place to bring up a story about AI misuse. “I was hoping that Councillor McDowell would have been in the chamber for this,” Murphy said, “but who knows, we might get another AI image later on of him sitting up there beside Councillor Doherty.” He then asked, with a theatrical pause: “We are wondering which is the proper image.” To hammerhome the point, he held up A4 prints of the fake rally pictures, including one he described as “a Glastonbury sized image” of the rally. The image of a huge crowd, printed out and waved around like evidence, was a visual trick that needed no explanation: it was absurd, exaggerated, and thoroughly fake. Murphy’s mockery was sharpened by his broader political point. “We can see the embarrassment on the other side of the chamber around the low number of people who actually support them,” he said. “They are having to take AI to try and swell the ranks. I think that tells us everything we need to know.” For his audience, the message was simple: the loyalist campaign around Drumcree may claim deep community support, but when it came to putting boots on the ground, the crowd was small enough that supporters felt the need to invent a larger one with software. The chamber atmosphere, already tense because of wider Drumcree rows earlier in the meeting, thickened even further.
McDowell, speaking remotely, did not try to hide from the attack. He accepted the label, but asked for perspective. “It doesn’t take an old man with a misunderstanding of AI to not be embarrassed, coming to speak on this now,” he said. “But don’t let the actions of this old eejit detract from what has been an incredibly well supported campaign around Drumcree.” He then proceeded to argue that the picture, however foolish, was not the real story. “The 500 or so that were there when I was speaking doesn’t include those that were on the hill, doesn’t include those who attended last night,and doesn’t include the vast swathe of support that has come from unionism right across the province, for the plight of the orangemen on the hill.” His voice carried a note of frustration, a sense that a political movement with centuries of history and a deeply felt sense of grievance was being reduced to a silly social media post. Then he went further, invoking the language of rights. “One of the things that is most disappointing in all of this is the idea that you have had your rights denied for 28 years,andy you should be used to it. So just suck it up,and take it. What price do we put on human rights?” It was a question that clearly meant something profound to him, whatever one makes of the politics behind it. And finally, he did what few politicians are willing to do: he admitted fault without surrendering the broader argument. “I own the wee bit of damage I have done to the cause,” he said, “but the cause is right,and the cause is just,and I am happy to stand with them.” It was, in many ways, the most human thing said all evening: a mixture of guilt, stubbornness, pride, and hurt, all wrapped up in one rambling council chamber speech.
To understand why this apparently trivial story about a fake picture mattered so much, you have to go back to Drumcree itself. The latest stand-off had been sparked afterthe Parades Commission and an appeals court overturned a 28-year ban that had, for over a quarter century, prevented the Orange Order from marching down the nationalist Garvaghy Road in Portadown. To Orangemen and their supporters, that annual parade was an expression of cultural identity, religious tradition, and historical rights—something they believed had been denied too long. To nationalists and residents of the Garvaghy Road, however, the parade was experienced as triumphalist and intimidating, a reminder of majority domination that they had noless legitimate right ao resist. The court’s decision legally opened the door for the march, but physical reality on the ground proved more complicated: residents blocked the route, police moved to stop the procession, and the familiar, corrosive stand-off returned. In the days that followed, Belfast councillors from across the political spectrum—Sinn Féin, the DUP, the SDLP, the TUV, and People Before Profit—were all seen taking their positions on either side of the faultlinein Portadown, turning a local parading dispute into a symbol of Northern Ireland’s still-unresolved constitutional tensions. It was against this charged backdrop that McDowell’s AI image was unleashed. In such a polarized environment, crowd size has always been a form of political currency: the bigger the crowd, the stronger the mandate. So when the real crowd turned out to be modest, someone—perhaps out of frustration, perhaps out of a desire to project strength—reached for a digital shortcut. The AI image was not really about documentation at all; it was about propaganda, about creating a visual reality that matched what supporters felt should have been there, rather than what was actually there.
Ultimately, this story is about more than one politician’s red-faced embarrassment. It is about the collision between one of the world’s oldest political conflicts and one of the newest technologies for distorting truth. In the past, a rally’s size might have been exaggerated word-of-mouth, or distorted by a sympathetic newspaper sketch. Now, with a few taps on a phone, anyone can manufacture a crowd of thousands, insert politicians into rooms they never entered, and make lies look like testimony. McDowell’s “wee bit of damage” was real: he handed his political opponents a gift, undermined his own credibility, and allowed the media to pivot away from the substantive debate about parades, rights, and community relations. Yet his words still contained a raw eloquence. “What price do we put on human rights?” It is a question he believes applies above all to Orangemen who have waited twenty-eight years to walk a road they regard as theirs. But it is also a question that cuts with equal force in the other direction: what price do the residents of the Garvaghy Road put on their own rights, their safety, their sense of security in their own neighborhood? In that sense, the AI image was never really about the truth of that particular rally at all. It was about the desperate need to be seen to win in a political culture where perception often matters more than reality. The real crowd at Portadown was modest; the fake crowd was monumental; and the truth, as McDowell himself might now concede, could not be found anywhere in his social media feed. By the time the memes had done their work, another night had fallen on the hill at Drumcree, where Orangemen, residents, and police were still locked in a stand-off that no manipulated image, however clever, could wish away. And perhaps that is the real lesson: in the end, artificial intelligence can manufacture a crowd, but it cannot manufacture a resolution. That still has to be done the slow, difficult, human way—with all the embarrassment, foolishness, and stubbornness that entails.