Jim O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay South, Fianna Fail)
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My apologies. I was listening to the Deputies but I was also trying to look up the debate on the 2015 amending legislation that introduced section 4A. I am not sure what the view of Deputies and parties was at the time as regards section 4A.

I will reflect on Deputy Kelly's amendment, but the difference is that Deputy Kelly is saying we should include the words "material evidence as to an intention ... to incite", whereas I have "the intention of inciting persons to commit a terrorist activity". Generally, if we look through our legislation on incitement, it does not really talk about having material evidence. It is assumed that we are going to have to have evidence of intention in order for such a prosecution to take place.

On what Deputy Carthy said, I do not see this being used. We have had legislation before where we have assumed terrible things are going to happen. We do not live in a draconian state. In my opinion, to date we have not seen prosecutions before the courts in circumstances where people are saying that it is real interference in freedom of expression and it is outrageous that somebody is being prosecuted for that when he or she was just expressing a political opinion.

Everyone here abhors terrorist activity. If there are people out there who are seeking to incite vulnerable and malleable people to get involved in terrorist activity, I know that everyone in this room is supportive of ensuring that that is criminally sanctioned. However, in order to do that, we have to have some language in place. The difficulty with section 4A of the 2015 Act was its use of the words "with intent of encouraging". My understanding from the officials and the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, OPC, is that there was a vagueness to "encouraging". The OPC said it was not fit for purpose. That is why the word "inciting" is being used as opposed to "encouraging".

Deputy Gannon asked what it was we were trying to talk about here. I do not really like giving specific examples of a type of group of people that is going to be covered by legislation, although we did spend the earlier part talking about it. The type of thing we are talking about, broadly, is somebody online encouraging people to get involved in terrorist activity, such as blowing up people, killing people and getting involved in that type of terrorist activity on the basis of saying these were previous terrorist acts that were carried out, they were legitimate and they were justified, and wanting people to all proceed and get involved in fighting for whatever it is. That is the purpose of the legislation. There are a lot of malleable and impressionable people out there. Again, I do not like to use examples but if someone from, say, the far right was out there and inciting people online to go down and get involved in what are terrorist activities, Deputy Gannon would say that person should be prosecuted. In fairness to the Deputy, when the far right is encouraging and inciting people to engage in criminal activity - this example is not about terrorist activity - he is the first person to say, correctly, that it should be prosecuted for that. The type of situation we are dealing with here is where somebody is trying to incite people to commit terrorist activity. This is reprehensible. This is what we are trying to cover.

It can get confusing. We all come with our own political prejudices but if we look at legislation purely from the point of view of our own political perspectives - it is a difficult thing not to do and I do it as well - as opposed to looking at it objectively, then we can read too much into legislation and we can see dangers when in fact there are no dangerous.