Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for their opening statements and submissions. I want to go back for a moment to the hostility dimension and the aspect of the matter about which Dr. Taylor has spoken. One needs to be able to prove motivation and that is one of the key difficulties because proving motivation is the problem with all of this. It always struck me that one of the things we are dealing with here, as has been mentioned in the submissions, is that this is about aggravated incidents. It is about an attack or incident which is clearly illegal anyway and that an aggravating part of it is that the perpetrator is using a racial or sectarian slur, or whatever, while committing the illegal act and, therefore, there is clear evidence that the perpetrator is acting out of hate. However, hate speech, in itself, without a physical attack on, or violation of, somebody, is also something we must recognise, as was mentioned earlier. Such an act can cause as much harm to a victim as a physical attack, in many cases. I know that from speaking to people from the Travelling community and people of different ethnicity across the country who find such acts hurtful and horrible. It can have a long-term effect on them. Are we prepared to accept that we must prove, in some way, the hostility dimension? Is it possible to do it in a context where there is not another clear violation of a person's rights?