Ireland’s Draconian, Anti-Free Speech Law
In my Spectator column this week I’ve written about Ireland’s Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, colloquially known as the ‘Hate Crime Bill’. It will impose the most draconian free speech restrictions we’ve seen anywhere in a Western liberal democracy – it’s even worse that Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act. Here‘s how the piece begins:
I’ve always been envious of journalists who give their names to ‘laws’, as in O’Sullivan’s First Law: ‘All organisations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.’ So I’m going to take a stab at articulating Young’s First Law and it is this: ‘The more progressive a country is when it comes to sex and gender, the more authoritarian it is when it comes to speech and language.’
The Republic of Ireland is a case in point. Until recently, Ireland was one of the most sexually conservative countries in Europe. Same-sex marriage wasn’t legalised until 2015 and abortion was illegal until 2018. Yet having finally shaken off the yoke of Catholic oppression after 1,500 years, the Irish have embraced a terrifying form of secular authoritarianism. The country is about to pass a new hate speech law that will be the most draconian in the European Union.
According to the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, which has sailed through the Dáil and is currently being debated in the Senate, it will become an offence punishable by up to five years in jail to incite hatred against a person or group of persons based on their ‘protected’ characteristics, e.g. race, colour, nationality, religion, disability, sexual orientation and gender. According to critics of the bill, the inclusion of that last characteristic means that if you misgender a trans person, you could go to jail.
That sounds implausible, but ‘hate’ isn’t defined in the bill and I know from my work at the Free Speech Union that ‘hate speech’ is a phrase used by woke censors to silence opinions they dislike. For instance, we once went to bat for Kellie-Jay Keen after her petition on Change.org asking the Oxford English Dictionary to retain its definition of a woman as an ‘adult human female’ was removed on the grounds that defining a woman in that way is ‘hate speech’.
But it gets worse. Under the new bill, merely possessing material likely to incite hatred will be a criminal offence, even if you never actually share it with anyone. All the state will have to show is that you intended to do so and, provided it’s reasonable to assume that the material wasn’t meant for personal use, then the onus will be on the defendant to demonstrate that he didn’t have any plans to distribute it. In other words, this bill will reverse the burden of proof – guilty until proven innocent.
Worth reading in full.
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.
Recently, an internet acquaintance of mine shared a Facebook post about English palindromes. Because I thought she would like it, I put the following sentence into a comment:
Ein Neger mit Gazelle zagt im Regen nie.
That’s a palindrome in German which doesn’t really mean anything. Literally, it’s A black guys who owns a gazelle never hesitates when it’s raining. I got that from some jokes book I used to own in the 1980s. Due to use of the word Neger, German for negro, it was promptly classified as hate speech and I was duly sanctioned.
I stopped telling people about the bird feed we buy because the risk of mentioning that some of it was niger seed was terrifying.
Are laws like this draconian to deter “wrongthought” and gain votes from the woke mob or is it envisioned that they’ll be loads of convictions and overflowing prisons?
There’s probably nothing envisioned here. The people who create laws like this are doubtlessly convinced to do some very important right thing and that’s it.
It’s to make people self-censor. The fear of the law will make people more draconian about what they say!
Today, I had a weird encounter in the Reading M&S. There was a woman in her mid sixties (guess) hair dyed black in front of me in the queue. She had a scarf wrapped around her nose and mouth and seemed very nervous about the person in front of her. In order to maintain a distance, she purposely pulled her stuff on the conveyor back by about a foot. I put my stuff onto the conveyor when she had moved forward enough so that I could access it and then moved forward as she moved forward because people endlessly blocking access to the conveyor always annoy me. This means I was standing at the counter while she was packing her stuff into a bag. This made her even more nervous and once she had grabbed everything, she stepped back until she was about half a meter away from the whole thing and then paid by literally throwing twenty pound notes onto the counter from a distance. While she did that, she was muttering to herself (with the intent of being heard, obviously) something about Bad people who cannot just stand next to their shopping as they really should. This obviously… Read more »
I like to think I have sufficient maturity not to feign severe coughing should I find myself in a similar situation. But I’m glad I don’t.
Unfortunately, the idea that – instead of shouting back at her – I should have coughed in her general direction only occurred to me when I was back home.
🙂
I went to the dentist yesterday and she and her assistant were wearing masks. So it seems there are two kinds of stupidity. (1) People who are stupid in all respects, and (2) People who are only stupid in some respects, because clearly a dentist is not entirely stupid in all respects. ———-Or perhaps as I suspect, my dentist is actually brainwashed rather than stupid.
Nothing can be “envisioned” because that’s not a real word. It’s an invention of 1990’s semi-literate American marketing hacks who couldn’t remember the word they really wanted (envisage), so they made one up. See if you can find it in any English dictionary from the 20th century.
Does that mean stand-up comedians like Ricky Gervais will need to boycott Ireland? Does that also mean comedy shows ( which are funny AF to all normal people ) such as this will be banned? What are people going to laugh at in Ireland if they can’t take the p*ss anymore?? 😮
https://twitter.com/GoldingBF/status/1674455985279188992
Why do you believe it’s right to be laughing when there’s a climate emergency which will wipe out all life on this planet in just a few years?
People in Ireland are obviously not supposed to laugh, at least insofar the woke legions of doom are concerned.
Ah right. Greta got an extension then..🙀
I’ve made that one up. But there was a real-world example for it: When new years eve celebrations were being outlawed for the second time in Germany after the second year of the so-called pandemic, one of the official justifcations was It’s just not proper to have a cheerful celebration while a deadly pandemic is ongoing.
Yes, the social stigma, peer pressure in society has been ruthlessly manipulated since 2020. Think about the… spirited… discussions people have here. I mean, we’ve all clashed with each other quite vigorously from time to time, but I look forward to everyone’s replies and basically like everyone who posts here – although unfortunately I think some of Marianna Spring’s mob have started paying up to try to bait people, because there’s nothing like creating news when nothing’s there to report! I don’t dislike Ian Rons’s articles, inflammatorily-written as they are, although I find his defensively calling people who disagree with his Zelensky panegyrics ‘Ivan’ to be unnecessary. 😉 Thing is, the comments we all make on this site are refreshingly blunt. I kind of like it when someone metaphorically smacks me round the chops. It makes me think about what I’ve written. The worst aspect of these hate speech laws will be the increasing infantilisation of the public: that someone here could manipulate a discussion, then blub to the police and actually be taken seriously and get someone else into trouble. People actually need to be taught to remember to disengage. I’ve had it happen to me elsewhere that a… Read more »
Further to my post on the ‘affirmative action’ ruling:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident… that all men are created equal” – unless they “misgender” men…
This is hilarious. It’s the Woke Barmy Army versus the climate change Lunatic Society. I wonder if the rainbow pervert loons will capitulate to the eco nutjobs…the sheer temerity of them!
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1674505023508692994
The tone of the letter is quite telling: JSO claims to be engaged in legitmate political protest. But here, they’re demanding that the Pride organizers use their means to amplify the goals of JSO on threat of (passively aggressive) violence. As I wrote a couple of times in the past already: JSO are not protesters. They’re terrorists. Sometimes openly so.
It’s this bit; ”Not meeting these demands will mean we may or may not take action at this weekends events.”
May or may not, eh? My god, they really have got quite the opinion of themselves and are getting some sort of sick pleasure from apparently having the upper hand here. I couldn’t care less what happens because either way people are going to be having their road blocked by seriously delusional nutters.
This did make me laugh though. We’ve moved up a notch from water! lol
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1674470767134646292
Love it.
Oh this is wonderful. Thanks Mogs.
I wonder whether I would be arrested in Ireland for having this meme saved in my phone?
https://www.technocracy.news/hohmann-nwo-control-grid-starts-with-the-connectivity-of-everything/
Talking about control.
“The plan is for a vastly smaller global population using things connected to the internet and the electric-power grid where they can be monitored 24/7 and 100 percent controlled, not only in terms of their movement and use of resources, but also in terms of their speech and political expression on the connected devices.”
Farage & his Bank Accounts ! WTF !! This is massive 😨
No different to Reclaim Party which has never been able to open a business account. Almost as though TPTB don’t want any opposition….
Obviously the Irish took no notice of the goings on across the Irish Sea in Scotland. You get the government you deserve!
Two things to understand about Free Speech (1) It is Free, and (2) It is only Speech.—————– To the totalitarian who wants to impose their values on everyone, Free Speech is dangerous. So they find it necessary to control every argument by controlling the language that can be used. This is ofcourse tyranny. Under the guise of protecting people from each other we now have government creating laws to deny us having opinions that they don’t like. But “Bate Speech” is something that cannot be universally defined. Even the ECHR admit this. So here we are chasing after people for alleged crimes that cannot be defined, while at the same time finding less and less resources to chase after people for committing real crimes that can be defined. It really would be funny if it were not so utterly PATHETIC.
By this means, political opposition of any substance will become illegal in Ireland. And as we need freedom of speech to have freedom of thought, works of art and literature will be emptied of meaning.
Will this new law apply only to people speaking or writing within the jurisdiction of the Republic of Ireland, or could people be arrested within the Republic of Ireland for what they said or wrote or posted on the Internet within the law outside of the Republic of Ireland? I don’t know much about it, but I can foresee practical problems: For example, will Graham Linehan be free to safely tweet within the UK, within the laws of the UK, without running the risk of being arrested if he visits or lives in the Republic of Ireland even if he says or writes nothing while he’s there? Will Ricky Gervais be at risk of being arrested if he performs his “anti-trans” jokes in Dublin, or will he be at risk of being arrested if he sets foot in the Republic of Ireland even without performing the material, because he has performed it elsewhere? Will people be able to speak freely within the usual UK laws on the Belfast to Dublin train until they get to Newry, and then have to watch what they say as they cross the border? Or could they be arrested in the Republic of Ireland for… Read more »
The law is intended to control what is posted online, even on sites which aren’t hosted in Ireland.
GAB have said that they will continue to comply with the First Amendment as that is the jurisdiction of the site,
https://news.gab.com/2023/06/gab-com-refuses-to-comply-with-irish-hate-speech-and-anti-prayer-zone-laws/
There’s a lot more to it than that though. If Graham Linehan says something in the UK which isn’t against any UK law, but which might be against this new law in the Republic of Ireland, would he be at risk of being arrested when he’s in the Republic of Ireland for what he said in the UK?
GAB are refusing to comply is all I stated.
I don’t know anything else about the other points you raised. I just posted a very narrow response.
Some think they are infallible so anyone who disagrees with them must be wrong – i.e. those who disagree must be engaging in disinformation, misinformation, hate speech.