The Irish Government has announced it is scrapping its plans to introduce significant updates to Ireland’s existing hate speech laws, as there is not enough support for the proposed legislation. Remarkably, the legislation had already passed the lower house of the Irish Parliament by an overwhelming margin (114 in favour, 10 against) in April 2023, but began to stall in the Senate as its more problematic features came to light. It had gained international notoriety when it came under fire from X’s CEO, Elon Musk.
Free speech advocates across the world should find solace in the fact that a regressive piece of legislation with dire implications for free speech, is now dead in the water, in spite of being a “sure thing” less than two years ago. This is a piece of legislation, after all, that had already comfortably passed in the lower house of Parliament, was supported by all major political parties, and was initially only resisted by a handful of journalists, politicians and political activists. The Irish Government had staked their reputation on the passage of this hate speech law, so they would not have withdrawn it at the last minute unless they had come under intense political pressure.
Ireland already has had hate speech legislation on its statute books for over 30 years: the 1989 Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act. However, that legislation set the bar for prosecution quite high, insisting on the need to demonstrate that someone is knowingly and/or intentionally inciting hatred. Consequently, only a handful of convictions have been secured in over 30 years.
The Government sought to remedy this situation by drafting the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill in 2022, which would have introduced a more stringent and wide-ranging hate speech regime in Ireland. Had it passed, the Hatred and Hate Offences Bill would have had the following legal effects:
- In the 1989 legislation, categories protected from hate speech were race, religion, colour, nationality, membership of the travelling community or sexual orientation. The 2022 Bill expanded this list of protected characteristics to include gender, sex characteristic, disability and descent. So, the basis for pressing hate speech charges would have been significantly broadened, had this law been passed.
- In the 1989 legislation, Gardaí (police) may seize physical objects from a person’s home during a search-and-seizure operation, if they “reasonably” suspect such objects contain offensive material that was intended to be published. The updated legislation would have given Gardaí the power to compel citizens to hand over passwords or encryption keys to access their privately stored data.
- The 1989 legislation allows Gardaí to seize physical materials in the context of a search-and-seizure operation, while the new legislation explicitly authorised Gardaí to confiscate electronic data, but also to retain and copy it for as long as needed for the investigation.
- The 1989 legislation allows someone charged with a hate speech offence to avoid prosecution by showing that he did not in fact intend to stir up hatred, and was unaware that the material in question was “threatening, abusive, or insulting”. The 2002 legislation would have made it easier to secure a prosecution, by allowing convictions in case an individual was “reckless” as to whether their actions could incite hatred.
- The 2002 Hatred and Hate Offences Bill would have introduced steeper penalties for hate speech offences. Whereas the established penalty is up to two years in jail, the revised penalty is up to five years in jail.
In spite of the defeat of the Government’s new hate speech legislation, Ireland’s Justice Minister Helen McEntee is adamant that she will pass another version of this Bill, dealing with “hate crime” rather than “hate speech”, and has suggested the revised bill would retain the expanded list of protected characteristics, including “gender”. Furthermore, the 1989 Incitement to Hatred Act, which remains the law of the land, contains deeply problematic features, including the right to search private property based on a “reasonable suspicion” that an individual possesses offensive material intended for publication.
Thus, the battle for free speech in Ireland is far from over. Nevertheless, this was something of a David-and-Goliath situation: all major political parties had backed the Hatred and Hate Offences Bill, and it had already passed the lower house of the Parliament by an overwhelming margin – 114 votes in favour, 10 against. Only a handful of mainstream journalists in Ireland spoke out against the Hate Offences Bill. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties, along with numerous other NGOs, came out in its favour, and expressed “disappointment” that the Justice Minister was dropping all elements of it pertaining to hate speech.
So, this is certainly a victory free speech advocates should savour and learn from. A small but powerful coalition of voices and organisations, including Senator Michael McDowell, Free Speech Ireland, Elon Musk and ADF International, were able to make enough of an intelligent “ruckus” about the Hate Offences Bill to sink it. Champions of free speech across the world would do well to learn from this uphill victory.
David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society in Pamplona, Spain. This article was published by the Brownstone Institute from the author’s Substack.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
If this is to be delayed until every adult has been offered a jab then its only point is to segregate those who choose not to be vaccinated or coerce them into having it. Vaccines must remain a free choice.
As part of Hitlers entirely constitutional rise to totalitarian power he held a free vote asking Germans whether they approved of him being both Chancellor and President (ie Dictator).
They freely chose to vote 90% in favour of Security, Freedom be dammed.
This is where we are now; it required Germany to be utterly destroyed in WW2 for her citizens to find redemption.
Coercion and segregation? To quote the great Basil Fawlty, ” This is exactly how Nazi Germany started! “. I for one won’t be joining in.
Distracting us into the summer with discussing the morality of vaccine Passports while lockdown itself grinds on and on.
Johnson of course will eat his own ID as he has already stated
According to the Government a third of people with Covid don’t have syptoms or know they have it. Therefore I could claim to have been infected and therefore be immune even though I never sought medical advice because I was asymptomatic. Would this allow me to go to the pub without having a vaccine?
The government created mass hysteria to force people to comply with the rules, and now find that they have to do anything possible to allay people’s fear to try and get the country and economy up and running again (this is the only reason they introduced the mask mandate, mass testing in schools etc.) You really couldn’t make it up.
He must believe it has been long enough since his colleagues peddled out the reassuring bullshit about the government “not planning on vaccine passports” saying it would be “discriminating”.
The lies… the bare-face lies…
Well, it has been more than an hour since he said that, so probably thinks we’ve all forgotten.
And so we are almost there , nearly inside to invisible box of control . Just a little more subterfuge, another nudge or two and the flock will be in the pen .
Those of us who warned of this over a year ago and were summarily dismissed as cranks have been proved correct, again .
No fancy statistical skills required, no labyrinthine algorithms or sage memberships or affiliations to the WHO were required to forecast the events of the last year , only simple common sense and a comprehensive understanding of the real forces at play in the World today.
Anyone who still thinks this is all necessary for public health simply isn’t fit to comment on these matters. The lamentable show of some 35 , I repeat that 35 conservative MPs exposes the true nature of the political class in the country .
None of this is for our benefit .
Here’s another prediction for the anniversary of lockdown#1 , this isn’t going to end , it isn’t supposed to end . It will only end when people rise up out of their self induced hypnosis and take back control of their lives. Do you see that happening? Let’s check back here in year and see .
I’m running out of conspiracy theories. All mine are coming true.
I suppose I had better respond to the passport consultation. Does anyone have any killer lines to help me cut through the waffle?
Go to https://stopvaccinepassports.co.uk/ they have templates.
There are no “difficult issues… moral complexities, ethical problems that need to be addressed”, around freedom passes . They are abhorrent, an abomination, evil and the suggestion of them should be rejected out of hand.
Very simple, don’t go to the pub, resulting in no customers no pub, another business destroyed. There is another option, remember prohibition in the good old USA in the ’20s and ’30s, set up a bootleg operation, buy your supplies on the black market (no taxes), pick some secret locations and get p***ed.
Alternatively, how easy is it going to be to fake paperwork/phone apps to indicate you’ve been vaccinated/tested neg?
Not that I’m advocating fraud, but if it’s a simple piece of paper or a view of a phone screen, either are going to be easy to copy
I am fully advocating fraud. If this comes in, I will help people to make fake ones.
Put me down for a couple.
I would encourage this if needed. However having to show anything , real or fake is just evil. I have had the vax and object to being forced to prove it to live normally
Interesting that the PM actually said “You might only be able to implement a thorough-going vaccination passport scheme even if you wanted such a thing in the context of when absolutely everybody had been offered a vaccine.”
whereas when the government’s propaganda wing, the BBC, reported this their report had it more along the lines of, ‘vaccine passport scheme will be put in place once all have been vaccinated’. I did paraphrase slightly, but still, there is a difference of emphasis – PM saying you might be able to do it as opposed to BBC saying it will happen – how many people did the BBC’s reporting manage to influence to make them sign up for vaccination???