What exactly will it be illegal to say in future that it is not currently illegal to say? Nobody seems to know
, which has been stalled since this time last year. It probably won’t happen until after the local and European elections in a month’s time. But it will come.and “hate related incidents” last year, to 651. This followed a 29 per cent increase in 2022. A group of NGOs and campaigning organisations called for the Garda statistics to be the catalyst for revived Government and legislative action on the issue.
The stalled Bill would fix that. It will not actually – despite what a lot of people appear to think – make it a crime to hate someone. Rather, it will make existing crimes more serious by the addition of a hate motivation. It’s already a crime to assault someone. But if the hate crime legislation is passed then, for example, assaulting someone while exhibiting signs of racial hatred towards them would be classed as a hate crime and would attract a heavier sentence.
The definition in the proposed law is a much narrower one – instead of a “perception test”, it requires a “demonstration test”, where the person accused of a hate crime must be found by the court to have exhibited some demonstration of hatred – for example, by using hateful language in the course of an assault.
Perhaps these things can be ironed out. But it seems that the proposed law will need to be a lot clearer about what it actually means. This week, the Department of Justice told me that it is “designed to protect vulnerable communities from the most serious types of hate speech – speech that will put them in harm’s way. It is not intended to enforce politeness or political correctness.
The state of play now is that chunks of the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael parliamentary parties are dead set against proceeding with the hate speech elements. The Green Party said this week that it was a “key commitment in the programme for Government” One Government insider, however, says that “the PPs are near unanimous ... they will be in uproar if it’s pushed forward.”
Garda-Siochana Department-Of-Justice Fine-Gael Fianna-Fail Green-Party Michael-Mcdowell
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