Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for missing my slot. Things moved very quickly.

I acknowledge the excellent work carried out by the member organisations of the Coalition Against Hate Crime Ireland - organisations and networks like Pavee Point, the Irish Traveller Movement, the Irish Network Against Racism, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and the Transgender Equality Network. They all have a proud track record in fighting against the many forms of prejudice, discrimination and oppression.

In December 2020, People Before Profit worked with many of those groups to launch the Le Chéile coalition. Its goal is to work together to counter the rise of the far right and the potential rise of fascism in this country and to prevent it from gaining the kind of foothold that we have seen in other European countries such as Italy, Sweden and France. People Before Profit is completely opposed to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, Islamophobia, antisemitism and all the other forms of prejudice and oppression. We condemn hate speech, threats, harassment, intimidation and violence against anyone purely on the basis of the colour of their skin, their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Unfortunately, this discrimination, oppression and prejudice has become more common in recent years and far too little is being done about it. The latest annual report from the Irish Network Against Racism, INAR, records 14 racist assaults in 2021, 39 cases of racist harassment and 13 threats to kill or cause serious harm. In one case, a mixed-race woman in a supermarket was asked by a stranger about her background and then sexually assaulted, which is horrendous. In another, a black African woman was verbally abused and threatened with a 30 cm knife held to her throat after she asked a stranger to respect social distancing in a bus station. The psychological impacts on victims can be devastating, making them too scared to go out at night or let their children go out to play. One parent quoted in the report said, "My youngest son is getting scared to go out my door and play in case of being called names."

None of this should be happening in our society and action must be taken against it. We support the Coalition Against Hate Crime Ireland's call for a national action plan against hate. This must include much greater Government funding of education and outreach to combat hateful attitudes and to make protected groups aware of their rights, better data gathering on hate speech and hate crimes, and better victim support.

The best way to combat hate crimes is to prevent them from happening in the first place. For us, as socialists, that means tackling the extreme inequality and oppression that are part and parcel of the for-profit capitalist system and written into its DNA. It is in the interests of capitalists and this right-wing Government to pit men and women, migrant and non-migrant, black and white, straight and LGBTQ+ against each other and have them blame each other for their problems rather than to have them unite as workers and demand better wages, better public services and a better life for all.

Refugees and migrants are not to blame for the housing and homelessness crisis or for low wages and poor working conditions. The ones to blame are Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and the landlords, bosses and vulture funds they represent. We need to target our anger not downwards but upwards against the rotten system of capitalism that oppresses and exploits us all, not the people most marginalised and oppressed by it. That is also how we will combat the far right.

Turning to the detail of the legislation, I strongly support the original idea behind the Bill which is to protect groups that are discriminated against and oppressed in our society from hate speech and hate crimes. However, People Before Profit is very concerned about how this Bill has been drafted by the Government, in particular the lack of clear human-rights based definitions and the insertion of problematic new clauses relating to hate speech that are wide open to abuse by individual District Court judges and gardaí. It is mainly the sections on hate speech in Part 2 that we find problematic. We agree with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties that hate speech should not have been bundled into the same Bill as hate crimes, as the Government has done. However, we also have some issues with the manner in which less serious crimes can be treated as hate crimes in Part 3.

The definition of hatred in section 2, which applies throughout the Bill, is "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". That is a tautological definition. Its effect, as the ICCL has pointed out, is to effectively say that hatred is hatred. I do not understand why this definition was used rather than more precise language. There are many international examples of more precise language. For example, hatred could be defined far more clearly as "a state of mind characterised as intense and irrational emotions of opprobrium, enmity and detestation towards a person or group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics and that involves bias, prejudice, contempt or hostility".

Regarding the protective characteristics in section 3, because of the shoddy way in which the Bill has been drafted by the Government, we have concerns that the inclusion of religion as a protected characteristic in exactly the same way as the other grounds could create a chilling effect on legitimate criticisms of the Catholic Church. This could even potentially discourage people from criticising the church's promotion of exactly the kind of sexism, homophobia and transphobia that the Bill seeks to address. It could also potentially be used to level bogus charges of antisemitism and antisemitic hate speech against pro-Palestinian activists.

Section 11 on freedom of expression is also problematic. It protects "discussion or criticism of matters relating to a protected characteristic" but it fails to clearly defend the rights to express information or ideas that may be offensive, shocking or disturbing to some. Using again the example of the Catholic Church, it is clear that strongly worded criticism of paedophile priests and the church's institutional cover-up of clerical sexual abuse would be protected, especially if a case came before a religiously minded District Court judge. I do not think it is clear that that would be protected. On the other hand, we are concerned that the general defence provided for that the objectionable speech or behaviour "consisted solely of ... a reasonable and genuine contribution to literary, artistic, political, scientific, religious or academic discourse" could turn into a carte blancheor religiously motivated homophobia or transphobia. Again, this problem could be addressed with a proper definition of hatred and a better definition of freedom of expression.

I now turn to the sections of the Bill that are totally unacceptable from our point of view and should be taken out in their entirety. Section 10 criminalises preparation or possession of hateful material "with a view to the material being communicated to the public or a section of the public" even where the material has not actually been published. That seems to amount to a form of thought crime. There is no actus reushere. There is no act of actually publishing. It is simply someone having this material in their private home.

Section 10(3) states that where "it is reasonable to assume that the material was not intended for the personal use of the person", the onus will be placed on the accused to prove their own innocence by showing that the material they prepared or even just material they possessed was never intended to be publicly communicated. That makes section 10 a dangerous reversal of the fundamental principle of being innocent until proven guilty by reversing the onus in terms of proof as well as effectively legislating for a thought crime. That should be removed.

Section 15 allows a District Court judge on the say-so of a garda of any rank to issue a search warrant for any premises, including people's homes, on suspicion that hate speech is being published or prepared for publication there. This grants the Garda wide-ranging powers to search electronic devices and linked electronic devices, to demand passwords for people's phones, etc. No safeguards appear to be in place to prevent this from potential abuse by politically motivated judges or gardaí. It applies equally to offences under section 10 as to actual published hate speech or genocide denial.

Part 3 deals with hate crimes.

We support the idea that serious crimes like assault, threats to kill or to cause serious harm, coercion, harassment and endangerment, should be treated as aggravated offences if hatred is a motivating factor. However, we are concerned about the manner in which the Government is seeking to apply the same rationale to more minor offences. I fear that the way the Bill is drafted would mean that some of the public order offences, which are covered under section 18, in particular threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour in a public place, could be used as a weapon to stigmatise legitimate protesters by politically motivated gardaí.

The Government's decision to use a demonstration test as evidence of hatred, rather than the usual test of a criminal motive, heightens the risk of political abuse of this section. This means that rather than having to prove that hatred was a motive for abusive or insulting behaviour in order to gain a conviction for abusive or insulting behaviour aggravated by hatred, all a Garda would have to do is to say under oath that someone used a racial or sexist slur during or immediately after abusive or insulting behaviour. As was shown, for example, in the Jobstown trial, the media and the courts would be likely to take their word for it unless there happened to be, as there was in that case, video evidence to the contrary. The risk of political policing is further increased by the inclusion of wording that, "It is immaterial whether or not an accused person’s hatred is also on account (to any extent) of any other factor." That means that protesters with legitimate grievances could be stigmatised forever as hate criminals, simply on a garda’s say so.

Legal experts in this area, Jennifer Schweppe and Amanda Haynes, point out in their submission on the Bill that the demonstration test is not used in hate crime legislation anywhere else in the world apart from the UK, Singapore and Malta. Ironically, it can actually lead to a disproportionate level of convictions of people from oppressed minorities for hate crimes. This happened with black people in the UK. They also show how being convicted of a hate crime creates a stigma and can prevent people from finding employment, which means that wrongful convictions for any form of hate crime have very serious and lifelong consequences.

For all these reasons, People Before Profit-Solidarity will unfortunately be unable to support this Bill as it is currently drafted. It is a real pity that the worthy goal of protecting oppressed groups from hate crimes has been dealt with so badly by the Government, including by tangling it up with provisions that grant excessive powers to the gardaí without including effective safeguards. We will be tabling a range of amendments to the Bill on Report Stage, including for the complete deletion of section 10, the deletion of the demonstration test and for proper definitions of hatred and freedom of expression.

See this speech in context