Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the Minister on her return and on the joy that led to her absence.

I want to quote something for the Minister: "I believe my new Hate Crime and Hate Speech Bill will contribute in a very real way to allowing everybody in Ireland to live without fear, to live the most authentic version of themselves." That is something the Minister tweeted on the day she introduced this Bill in the Dáil. I do not believe she tweeted it today. It would be very strange if she did because, in a very real way, her Bill has contributed to the fear among many ordinary people that if this legislation passes there will no longer be clarity on what they may say using robust freedom of expression – expression not intended to harm people but expression that might certainly offend and that could be called hate speech, as such expression frequently is.

With regard to the very word "hate", which is at the core of the Bill, the sensible thing for the Minister to do would be to separate out the hate crime dimension of Bill, which is what she says needs to be dealt with in line with international standards. She would get this through in a heartbeat. If she were seriously interested in consultation, she would separate it and put it through. We could return on another occasion to tease out the issues of hate speech. Fundamentally, it is not the incitement-of-violence dimension of the Bill that worries anybody here – we are all against that and hate crime and accept what the Minister is seeking to achieve in this area – but the incitement-to-hatred dimension, because the Bill leaves "hate" undefined. I wonder why that is.

The Minister's predecessor, Deputy Harris, reminded us that the view of the Department of Justice is that hatred is a commonly understood concept in law. Deputy Harris said he did not wish to be overly prescriptive because he wanted to avoid the unintended consequence of actually raising the bar for a successful prosecution. Without any further guidance, we can only presume that the current Garda understanding of hate will apply. That definition, insofar as it relates to non-crime incidents, covers any non-crime incident that is perceived by any person to be motivated, in whole or in part, by hostility or prejudice. Is that to be the subjective standard for investigating and harassing citizens?Is that to be the subjective standard for investigating and harassing citizens, namely any incident perceived by any person to be motivated by prejudice? Is the Bill to be a licence for cranks and the easily offended? I hear Senator Ward's "Trust me I'm a barrister" approach to the Bill. Frankly, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev, let me tell you why we do not trust you. It is because he has come in here with college debate level denigration of the sincere concerns of many, concerns that have been forcefully and relatively articulately expressed by a broad range of people in recent times. His response is to denigrate them and then tell us that he will listen carefully nonetheless to what is proposed.