The Fight for Free Speech in Ireland is Not Over Yet

The Irish government’s mission to make Ireland the wokest place suffered a setback a few days ago, when justice minister Helen McEntee quietly announced that the government was dropping its plan for highly controversial new hate-speech laws. These proposed speech restrictions were included in the Criminal Justice – incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences – Bill. McEntee has now conceded that ‘the incitement-to-hatred element of the bill does not have a consensus’. Describing these proposed hate-speech laws as lacking‘consensus’ is a piece of masterful understatement.
The legislation which will live on with the hate-speech elements removed has attracted criticism for its far-reaching implications for free speech, not just in Ireland but also across the West. And with good reason. Dublin is home to the European HQs of various tech and social-media companies, such as Meta, Google and X. If it had been introduced in its original form, the bill would have had a huge impact on social-media users across Europe and further afield, as those companies based in Ireland would have been regulated under the new laws. This would have given the domestic Irish legislation outsized global significance.
The original bill criminalised ‘incitement to hatred’, but its definition of hatred was completely circular. Ministers rejected all attempts to introduce a more workable and clear definition into the law, because doing so would make convictions ‘significantly more difficult to secure’. The vague definitions didn’t stop there. The bill would have criminalised ‘hatred’ expressed against someone on the basis of their ‘gender identity’, which was defined as the ‘gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female’.
Bizarre and confusing passages such as this were not drafting mistakes. They were a central feature of the proposed law, designed to create a state of uncertainty as to what would constitute illegal ‘hate speech’. In a further chilling element, Section 10 of the bill would have made it an offence even to possess material that was likely to ‘incite hatred’. So even having offensive memes on your phone could have invited criminal prosecution under the proposed law. It’s unclear how the government intends to proceed with the rest of the legislation. Still, Ireland is not out of the woods yet where free speech is concerned. McEntee has said that the hate-speech element of the bill ‘will be dealt with at a later stage’, suggesting she may reintroduce these speech restrictions in a separate bill in the future.
Ireland has undergone a social revolution of sorts in the past 10 to 15 years. It has introduced gay marriage, gender-identity laws, as well as gender ideology into schools. The current Irish ruling class is made up of an overwhelmingly left-wing media, NGOs and academics, along with craven politicians eager to embrace wokeness as a way of – in their eyes – casting off Ireland’s Catholic and conservative past. And there is nothing wrong with that. Recent high-profile crimes committed by migrants, combined with a complete failure of the government’s emergency-accommodation system for asylum seekers, has led to significant tensions and protests in communities across Ireland.
The response of the government to these developments has not been to address the underlying concerns, but to propose a crackdown on free speech. Ireland has become ground zero in the global censorship wars, due to the concentration of tech companies in Dublin. Indeed, Ireland’s media regulator will soon become the main enforcer for the EU’s Digital Services Act. The Digital Services Act gives sweeping legal powers to the European Commission and national regulators to investigate and prosecute alleged misinformation, illegal content and otherviolations of the stringent rules imposed in the Digital Services Act. So while the shelving of these hate-speech laws is to be welcomed, the Irish government’s efforts to control speech and thought are not over. Those of us committed to free speech cannot afford to be complacent.
Written by Hillary Panashe