Dr. Amanda Haynes:

The legislation suggests that Irish people take hate crime seriously. For example, 78% of the respondents to the survey were of the view that in the last five years, the level of hate crime in Ireland had increased. Of the remainder, only 4% felt that it had decreased and only 19% felt that it had remained unchanged. Certainly, there is an indication that people regard hate crime as being a problem in Irish society. People are supportive of approaches to dealing with it through the criminal justice system. However, we have to ask, when we are dealing with hate crime through the criminal justice system, what is the outcome we want to have. Is the outcome to deter hate crime? Is the outcome to ensure that re-offending does not occur? We might, for example, create a range of hate crime offences with a low threshold and that might create a large number of people who have been labelled as hate crime offenders.

That will conflate those who committed an offence because they acted out of prejudice against an individual with those who committed an offence for a reason which had nothing to do with prejudice they might hold or act against, but used, for example, a slur in the course of that offence. How will that impact on what we now see in terms of the public reproach for hate crime offences? Will the public buy in to hate crime legislation which treats those who have committed crimes out of prejudice in the same way as it does those who committed crimes, for example, for financial motivation and used a slur in the course of that offence? How will that affect the public buy-in to the impact we are trying to achieve?

The creation of hate crime offences will impact on public awareness of hate crime as an issue. It will send a clear message to the public that we as a society reject the targeting of individuals because of who they are or their identity. The question is whether that deterrent effect will be sustained if the legislation is so broad that we end up with large numbers of convictions, for example, for public order offences where a slur is used in the course of commissioning the offence or other offences which occur for reasons outside of the decision to act out of prejudice. I have concerns about-----