Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I was listening to Senator McDowell's remarks before leaving my office and I was very impressed by everything he had to say, particularly in the way he pointed to the incoherence between the constitutional change that the Government went to great efforts to bring about and the remaining existing provisions in the Constitution. He is warning about absolutely gratuitous attacks on religion now being facilitated by this. His point was very wisely delivered in the context of his very liberal concern to protect and guarantee free speech.

I was also struck by what Senator O'Sullivan had to say in regard to hate crimes. I might take this opportunity to say that I do not believe legislation on hate crime is at all a solution to the kind of problems we are facing. There is real confusion in people's minds when they seek to criminalise the motivation for crime. It is the action that is criminal. The motivation might very well go to sentencing, but it is cultural solutions we need in order to tackle the hatred that underlies certain crimes. There is a real confusion in significant parts of the cultural establishment about this issue.

Was what happened to Mr. Lunney in recent days, one of the most brutal things to happen in the history of this State, and something that make us all sit up and think about what is happening to our society in a way that may or may not be connected to with the decline in religious practice - was what happened to him a hate crime? Was it any less serious for not being a hate crime of the kind that some people would like to define in this country? We need to be very careful when we fail to make the distinction between the motivation and the action.

Today, the Seanad is again devoting time to an issue which is so divorced from the concerns of ordinary people, so totally irrelevant to their daily lives, as to almost reduce what we are doing in these Houses at this moment to the level of a joke. It was the widely respected former Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Keane, who said in 1991 that a referendum to remove the blasphemy provision would be a time wasting and expensive exercise, and he was correct. After wasting millions of euro on a referendum to abolish a dead letter constitutional provision last October, we are now devoting our time to abolishing a number of dead letter legislative provisions which flowed from it. Why? I think it is the intention to provide more politically correct red meat to the now-dominant cultural elite in this country. I can see no other good reason all of this is happening. There is no significant cultural mischief that is being addressed here.