By Martin O’Reilly
The government of the Republic of Ireland is currently proposing a new hate speech law, as part of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, which would update the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989. It is argued the existing law, particularly on account of the presence of social media, is insufficient. The aim is to give more power to prosecutors in order to make the issuing of convictions easier. Under the current law, defendants can appeal their charges by proving they did not have the intention of transmitting hatred; however, the new legislation will consider defendants liable even if their actions were not intentional. The protected characteristics in the new legislation include race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation and disability. Someone found guilty of an offence could potentially be liable to imprisonment for five years. The bill has been approved by the government and is currently proceeding through the Seanad (the upper house of parliament). Despite calls to abandon the legislation after the government badly lost two referendums in March and Leo Varadkar’s decision to step down as Taoiseach (Prime Minister), their plan is to proceed with it, albeit with possible amendments.
[ . . . ]Progressives should be aware that while the underlying reason for hate speech laws is to mostly silence far-right extremists, minorities — as Jacob Mchangama reminds us in Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media — have also been targeted under such laws. In Spain, for instance, a number of left-wing, anti-establishment rappers have received prison sentences for glorifying terrorism and insulting the monarchy in their lyrics. More recently, after the Hamas-led attack on Israel last October, attempts were made by France’s interior minister to ban all pro-Palestinian protests in the country as “they are likely to generate disturbances to public order.” In this way, hate speech laws, as the journalist and writer Kenan Malik reminds us, are often “a means not of tackling bigotry but of rebranding certain, often obnoxious, ideas or arguments as immoral. It is a way of making certain ideas illegitimate without bothering politically to challenge them.”
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