An IP address originating from Leinster House has been spotted making changes to Senator Jim Walsh’s Wikipedia article.
The changes to the article and the origins of the editor’s IP address were highlighted on Twitter by T.J. McIntyre, who is a law lecturer at University College Dublin.
The revision in question.
The screenshot above shows that a revision to Walsh’s Wikipedia page was made by somebody using the IP address 137.191.234.98. A subsequent WHOIS query shows that the IP address 137.191.234.98 is registered as a public-facing IP address for the Oireachtas.
WHOIS shows that the IP address is registered under the netname OIREACHTAS.
The IP address in question is shared by all outbound Internet traffic that originates from the Oireachtas.
While speaking on Twitter, McIntyre accused the person behind the IP address of attempting to ‘whitewash’ the entry; as a number of Walsh’s controversial comments about homosexuals had been removed from the article:
Someone at an Irish govt IP is whitewashing the Wikipedia entry for Senator Jim Walsh: https://t.co/rnQfylfYlj (1/n)
— TJ McIntyre (@tjmcintyre) September 14, 2015
One of the removed sections had focused on comments that Senator Jim Walsh had made back in March of this year, in which he said that the money being spent on the gay marraige referendum ‘would be better spent on HIV testing for gay community’.
The revision history for the changes can be found here.
