Local election candidate Emma Kiernan broke out of the local media to gain (perhaps fleeting) national fame this week, thanks to the interweb.
Kiernan, a Fine Gael candidate running for a spot on Newbridge town council, is young, attractive, and like many of her friends, she has a facebook profile.
Like everyone else on Facebook, her friends post party photographs on their pages, and in one of those photos, Emma can be seen enjoying herself at a friend’s 30th birthday party.
No doubt there will be several fuddy duddy reactions to the images, and a few equally po faced defences. There’s even a conspiracy theory that it was done deliberately to raise Emma’s profile.
I’ve seen several versions of the snap by now. It’s been cropped, blurred, mirrored and photoshopped and has appeared on several Irish political blogs, and even in the UK based Register, which also picked up the story. A few Irish national newspapers also picked up the story, and the Leinster Leader put it on the front page.
But that picture isn’t public property. In theory, each of those websites and newspapers owes a copyright fee.
And not to the photographer by the way, but to Facebook.
