In February this year, the Irish police reported that there had been an “exponential increase” in protests during the last year. Many of these were protests about the lack of affordable housing, or against plainly foolish schemes for housing refugees. At one point, the government suggested housing 950 Ukrainian refugees in a village of just 100 Irish residents. A few protests drew attention to the fact that refugee accommodations said to be reserved for Ukrainians fleeing from war seemed to be entirely occupied by working-age men from Africa and Asia.
Last week, an Algerian-born man who had lived in Ireland for over 20 years, and avoided deportation orders, stabbed three children in the city center of Dublin. Bystanders intervened; two of them ended up in critical condition. The reaction on the street spilled over into the worst rioting Dublin has seen in decades.
In response, the government has blamed “the far right” for the riots and revived efforts to pass a law criminalizing “hate speech.” The law would criminalize any speech “likely to incite hatred or violence” against protected groups. In some sense, the law is gratuitous. Ireland already has laws that prohibit people from instigating riots, and even laws against incitement to hatred. It has been the lax and generally liberal norms around these laws that have kept the Irish public from examining the new hate-speech laws closely or getting excited or anxious about them. Much of the debate about the law has been led by outsiders such as Elon Musk. But the Irish public’s presumption of its government’s good faith is very poorly placed regarding this expansive and wretchedly drafted legislation.
The hate-speech law currently under consideration is sweeping and draconian; it could be enforced only in a capricious way. We urge the Dáil and the Seanad to roundly reject it.
The problems with the law are manifold. First, its definition of hatred is tautological and legally meaningless: “‘Hatred’ means hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics,” it declares. Most astonishingly, one does not have to utter or even publish such speech. Mere possession of speech — memes stored on a cellphone, say — renders a person guilty if a judge later deems it “likely” to incite hatred. Refusing to share your text-message history with police, or to grant them your password to inspect the contents of your smartphone, brings a sentence of up to a year in prison. The law also presumes guilt once the legal gears start turning: “In any proceeding under this section . . . the person shall be presumed until the contrary is proved, to have been in possession of the material in contravention” of the law.
Those accused under the law would have to prove affirmatively that the statement they made, published, or possessed constituted “a reasonable and genuine contribution to literary, artistic, political, scientific, religious or academic discourse,” or “that it was necessary for another lawful purpose.” Notably, you cannot defend yourself by proving that the allegedly hateful statement is true.
Ireland has never had anything like America’s First Amendment. But its constitution does claim to guarantee “the right of the citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions,” albeit “subject to public order and morality.”
For decades, Ireland has celebrated itself for overthrowing the traditional forms of censorship that banned the publication of “blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter.” As recently as last week, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee called for draft legislation that would repeal entirely the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act. The repeal of those old laws followed so swiftly by the imposition of other ones regulating speech suggests Ireland retains its faith in the power of moralizing censorship to manage or disguise political failures. The modern development is only a changing of the social orthodoxies underlying that censorship.
The new hate-speech laws look like a desperate attempt by the government to prevent debate about Ireland’s demographic transformation. Everyone in Irish political life is aware that the European norm is that after a long period of mass immigration, there is typically a political response seeking to slow down or halt that phenomenon. Countries that had viewed themselves as specially immune to this reaction, such as Sweden, are now governed by these supposedly “far right” parties. Ireland stands out for not having even a single party that is defined by its opposition to mass immigration.
Ireland should know from long experience under foreign and native governments that criminalizing ideas does not prevent people from thinking them, believing in them, or acting on them. Democratic governments need to defend their policies in public, with a public that is free to express itself, even in terms that are bumptious and offensive.