A Wexford Fianna Fáil councillor has been left red-faced after completing a quiz on social networking website Facebook that said his personality type was comparable to cocaine.
Gorey town councillor Malcolm Byrne completed a quiz on Facebook called What Drug Are You? Based on the answers to six questions, the user is compared to a particular illicit drug.
After completing the quiz Mr Byrne's publicly viewable Facebook page contained an image with the headline: "I'm Cocaine!"
Yesterday morning, Mr Byrne change his profile page to private, which means that only his friends can see it.
When contacted by The Irish Timesyesterday, Mr Byrne said a friend had sent him the quiz and he had simply clicked on it without thinking. "I made an error of judgment and hold up my hand."
He said he does not "do drugs" and does not endorse their use. He added that he had removed the quiz from his page.
According to his biography on the Fianna Fáil website, Mr Byrne is the youngest member of Gorey Town Council and was elected on the first count in the 1999 and 2004 local elections.
Mr Byrne holds an honours degree in law from UCD. He was previously director of Screen Producers Ireland, the body for independent film and television producers, but was recently appointed head of communications with the Higher Education Authority.
The creators of the What Drug Are You? quiz claim it has 38,839 daily active users and that 5 per cent of all Facebook users have taken it.
Facebook has exploded in popularity in Ireland this year. Last January it had just 7,000 users but now there are almost 190,000 Irish users.
Part of its popularity has been the ability to share amusing applications between friends who also use the website.
The incident highlights the risk that people face when they put private or potentially embarrassing information on social networking websites and do not choose to make it private.
Facebook pages not marked as private now show up in Google search results of the wider internet.
Earlier this month, an intern in Anglo Irish Bank's US office got into trouble after his boss saw a picture of him at a Halloween party dressed in a fairy outfit on his Facebook profile. The employee had asked for time off, implying it was a family matter.