In a partial victory for free speech, the Irish Government is to drop controversial provisions contained within its new Hate Speech Bill. Those provisions would have made “communication” of material deemed capable of inciting “hatred” punishable by up to five years in prison, and mere “possession” of such material punishable by up to two years.
According to the Irish Times, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee received approval the leaders of the coalition Government over the summer to remove those parts of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill that deal with incitement to violence and hatred – commonly known as the ‘hate speech’ elements.
Speaking in Athlone, County Westmeath on Saturday, Ms. McEntee confirmed that the incitement to hatred element of the bill “does not have a consensus” – although, ominously, she went on to say that it will be dealt with at a later date.
Separately, a coalition source told The Irish Times: “While there was significant consensus in the Dáil for hate speech laws, with proposals from the Opposition to expand the law further, that consensus was lost.”
In what is likely to be seen as a clearing of the decks for an election that has to be called no later than March 2025, Ms McEntee will now introduce committee stage amendments to the bill, which has been stuck at Third Stage in the upper house of the Irish parliament since July.
The amendments will remove sections 7-10, with the bill then proceeding only with elements that mandate tougher sentences for existing crimes where the perpetrator of an offence is motivated by ‘hatred’ of the victim’s protected characteristic(s).
As a consequence, existing laws on the prohibition of incitement to hatred in the country will not be repealed and will remain in force.
Under the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989, which targets speech intended and likely to cause physical violence, the prosecution has to show the accused intended to incite hatred. What was so chilling about the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill as it is currently written, is that it went further on both counts – effectively lowering the criminality threshold from “incitement to violence” to “subjectively offensive”, while at the same time holding defendants liable even if they didn’t intend to stir up hatred.
Under the current iteration of the bill, it is a crime punishable by up to five years in jail to say anything, on- or offline, which anybody with a protected characteristic drawn from a long-list of such characteristics –race, religion, national or ethnic origin, gender (including transgender), etc. – perceives to be ‘hateful’.
In other words, the bill risked becoming an open invitation to every woke activist south of the Irish border to claim they perceived such-and-such a comment to be both “subjectively offensive”, with every Christian street preacher being accused of “homophobia” and gender critical feminist of “transphobia”.
Even if cases involving perceived hatred never reached the courts, the investigatory process – the knock on the door, the officers of the law pushing past you into your living room, the confiscation of your phone and laptop, the formal interview at the police station – would inevitably have had a chilling effect on free speech.
This was a point made by the independent Senator and former Justice Minister Michael McDowell, who took to the floor of the Seanad last year to express concern that Irish citizens would “shut their mouths” to “avoid the danger of being prosecuted”.
In a sinister echo of Ireland’s Committee on Evil Literature, which was established in 1926 – and the Censorship of Publications Act which followed and prohibited the sale and distribution of “unwholesome literature” – the bill also contains provisions that make it a crime, punishable by up to two years in jail, to “prepare or possess” material likely to incite hatred.
“Possession” in this context could simply mean having a dodgy meme or cartoon saved on your phone, or a copy of Mein Kampf on your laptop. These and other, similar cultural artefacts would certainly have fallen within the ambit of the criminal law, since the bill as written – e.g., Sections 10(1) and 10(3) – reversed the usual burden of proof, with the burden of proof resting with the accused to demonstrate the material was just for personal use.
Any attempt to frustrate the authorities in their pursuit of “unwholesome literature” wouldn’t have got tech-savvy Irish citizens very far since the legislation includes a provision that makes it a crime punishable by a fine of up to €5,000 or a year in jail to refuse to give the Garda a password to any electronic device that you own.
Ms. McEntee previously insisted that this section of the bill – section 10 – wouldn’t curtail freedom of expression because section 7(3) includes defences for “a reasonable and genuine contribution to literary, artistic, political, scientific, religious or academic discourse”. She argued it would therefore be possible to “debate and discuss issues regarding protected characteristics” and “offend other people or express views that make others uncomfortable”. The distinction, she said, is that “you can be offensive, say things that make others uncomfortable, have full and robust debate – but you cannot incite hatred or violence”.
But how much protection would this “distinction” actually provide, given that none of the legislation’s keywords and phrases – “hate”, “hatred”, “reasonable and genuine contribution” – have ever been defined?
Consider, for instance, a case like Dr. Nathan Cofnas, the Free Speech Union member and early career research fellow at the University of Cambridge, whose college recently cut ties with him over his research interests, which lie in controversial topics such as race and intelligence. In the world according to Helen McEntee, would his work receive legal protection as a “reasonable and genuine contribution” to scientific and academic discourse, or would it end up costing him his freedom?
How about an Irish art gallery that exhibited Andres Serran’s Piss Christ, that long controversial red and yellow photograph of a crucifix plunged into a vat of the artist’s urine? Is this “reasonable” art, or, as the country’s Committee on Evil Literature might have put it, “morally corrupting”?
And what about mocking memes – as independent senator Ronan Mullen asked during a debate on the proposed legislation in the Senate. “Will carrying a placard stating, ‘Men cannot breastfeed’ warrant a hate-speech investigation or up to five years’ imprisonment, a lifelong label as a criminal hater, and all of the stigma and life limitation that goes with that?” he asked, before concluding: “Nobody actually knows.”
Reacting to the Government’s decision to scrap the law’s hate speech provisions, Independent Teachta Dála (TD) Carol Nolan said: “This is a victory for free speech and a calamitous political and ideological defeat for Minister McEntee and a government that had to be pushed into accepting the validity of basic democratic norms.”
“It also demonstrates that the Minister is now an electoral liability,” she added.
Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín said he was delighted to see that the Government has dropped plans for hate speech law. It was a censorship law, which sought to prevent people articulating opposition to many of the Government’s policies, he said. Indeed, over the last few years, the Government had become increasingly authoritarian in terms of how it dealt with dissent.
“We’re delighted that our work against the bill has helped to bring about this outcome,” he said.
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Repeat after me:
Data are racist.
Facts are lies.
Breath is death.
Strokes are normal.
And as Monkey Pox shows, anal Schwabs are bad for your health.
this could also be to do with the massive backlog of people who have not been treated and left to suffer for the last two yrs, if you can’t get a doctors appointment or are left with a video call and left un or mis diagnosed, more people are becoming sicker as a result. These jabs are also a contributing factor as well as doctors etc dismiss that the jabs may be causing an effect which leads to a overlook of conditions etc.
Stress, depression, unemployment, overeating and drinking during lockdowns, mass vaccination.
All predicted as dangerous here by us two years ago.
Indeed. All of this was predicted by so many people, which makes one wonder why no real ‘risk-benefit” analysis occurred before these “health” and “safety” protocols were mandated. They all produced extra and unnecessary deaths. “Public health” has never been worse in my lifetime.
“jabs may be causing an effect” – we need to get real!
Time is getting short.
Coronavirus lockdown could cause ‘200,000 extra deaths’ | Metro News
is 200 greater than 6?
The cult becomes a cull
Every cloud
If this continues then by my calculation by the time winter fuel payments etc come due in October they will have saved themselves £30,588.800
They’ll call it a good start
Hmm, let’s see what could have caused this to happen?
Blame it on Liverpool fans
I didn’t know Trump supported Liverpool?
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/monkey-pox-update?s=r
Malone posted this an hour ago. Suggests that the monkeybollox has been genetically manipulated.
In conclusion, the preponderance of current evidence is pointing towards a hypothesis for the origin of this outbreak which is increasingly consistent with prior “war game” scenario planning, remarkably akin to that which occurred during Event 201, which posits emergence of an engineered Monkeypox virus into the human population during mid-May of 2022.
When asked why so many people in their twenties and thirties were dying prematurely of heart attacks and strokes, a spokeswomxn for the regime said “new regime science shows that coffee, bananas, atmospheric conditions, listening to the wrong kind of music, muffins, not sleeping enough, dogs, curtains, jelly beans, freedom, free speech, the right to protest, voting and cold air have all started causing heart attacks in 2022, and the novel cell therapy known to cause clots has nothing do to with it, bigots.”
These hypothesised current excess deaths of 10% or so associated with prior lockdown and or vaccines could have been running for the last twelve months.
Up until now masked in the weekly death data by the ‘premature [by a year or so] deaths’ of the very old and frail of 2020 being subtracted, or having been ‘brought forward’, from 2021-2022?
Those 120,000 excess deaths covering circa 2020 to early 2021 have to be deducted from later death data at some point.
‘According to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Covid deaths have been dropping as the Omicron waves have subsided…’
Lying toads!
Omicron was so mild it was indistinguishable from a slight Cold, so how could it be causing any more than a few chance deaths?
What they mean is Omicron has done what coronavirus do, start disappearing due to seasonal change, and they can’t pin deaths on it.
So add more than 1 000 because of tricksy ‘underlying’ double-talk.
Increase in all-cause mortality: mRNA ju-ju brew deaths which unlike CoVid are being vastly under-reported, deaths from other diseases due to weakened mRNA spike immune systems, and lack of medical care because the permanently overwhelmed NHS is overwhelmed.
But the real cause = Government. When will the arrests and trial start?
If we look at the occurrence data for all cause deaths for England and Wales (which aren’t affected by when bank holidays fall and distorts reported deaths) we can see there has been a move in all cause deaths above the 5 year (2015-2019) average since around the end of March. This increase associates with the latest booster experimental vaccine doses. Association isn’t proof of causation of course.
Ignore the very last point on that chart (20th May) as estimates of deaths that have occurred but not been reported will be subject to major uncertainty.
And essentially the same chart but this time showing the percentage that all cause deaths exceed the 2015-2019 average (i.e the percentage above the blue line the green line is in the previous chart)
There is this very good analytical substack, FC, it may interest you.
Causes of death in Massachusetts
https://coquindechien.substack.com/p/neoplasm-to-ectoplasm-in-months?s=r
Thanks. I’ll have a look later.
Needs to be broken down by age cohorts. I’d wager the 20-50 groups show a sharp increase compared to baseline.
Nothing to see here.
Your Govt loves you xxx
If they’re jabbed it serves them right, frankly.
Whisteblower’s Lawyer: Pfizer Got Away With Vaccine Fraud Because Government Was Co-Conspirator
https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/30/whisteblowers-lawyer-pfizer-got-away-with-vaccine-fraud-because-government-was-co-conspirator/
The gene therapies are working, slowly but steadily and surely.
Just another faint and fall and another cancer comeback after 25 years of remission in my circle of acquaintances came to my attention last week.
“Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide”
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/dear-friends-sorry-to-announce-a?s=r
Worth reposting here.
Noone can still believe in a cockup after having read just this.
“In the internal trials, there were over 42,000 adverse events and more than 1200 people died. Four of the people who died, died on the day they were injected.”
“The side effects about which Pfizer and the FDA knew but you did not, include blistering problems, rashes, shingles, and herpetic conditions (indeed, a range of blistering conditions oddly foreshadowing the symptoms of monkeypox).”
“The internal documents show that Pfizer (and thus the FDA) knew that angry red welts or hives were a common reaction to the PEG, a petroleum-derived allergen in the vaccine ingredients — one that you are certainly not supposed to ingest. Indeed, PEG is an allergen so severe that many people can go into anaphylactic shock if they are exposed to it. But people with a PEG allergy were not warned away from the vaccines or even carefully watched by their doctors, EpiPen in hand. They were left to their shock.”
Confirms for me for sure if I had had even one of those jabs I wouldn’t have suffered a jab injury. I’d be dead.
There was a very interesting article from a German pathologist which I saw this morning, basically saying that whenever he carries out an examination he finds tissue which has been damaged by the “vax” jab and which caused or contributed to the death by strokes, aneurysms etc.. The immune system tries to destroy the vax induced spike – with consequences which were predictable i.e. death.
I intended to provide a link – but guess what, it appears to have disappeared.
If anyone can find it please let me know.
It was, I think, from the Hart group.
Not the link you were on about, but covers the same information.
https://doctors4covidethics.org/vaccine-induced-damage-to-our-vascular-system/
Thanks for that, much obliged.
It is the same one, but I kept getting the dreaded P. 104
Non- Covid but what about Covid Vaccine deaths then?
I read Comment Sections for important anecdotes. This morning at a Substack site I read a post from someone who said a close friend works at a florist shop. This person said that her shop has never had so many orders for flowers for funerals.
I prefer to compare weekly deaths with those from years completely outside the hoax pandemic. I use ONS data for 2010-2019, adjusted by population totals to 2020.
What this shows is that this week is 10.6% above the ten-year maximum.
Even averaged over the last 3 weeks, it is 4.0% above maximum and 13.7% above average.
I update regularly on Telegram here.
Yes we all know the covid vaxx is driving excess death in every country that pushed the dangerous and lethal covid vaccines. Read Steve Kirsch, Joel Smalley, Jeff Childers, el gato on their substack. The information is all there. Also read Expose. Demand your gp and mp face reality and have access to this data. Legacy media will not print it. Until we are given back truth, honesty and integrity, this will continue. Demand your rights back.
See infant mortality rates in Scotland – shock increase reported!