Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will regretfully disagree with my friend and colleague, Senator Flynn, on her reaction to the Government's announcement that it is pulling in its horns, so to speak, on the hate speech dimension of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill. It needs to be understood that every reasonable person in our society is against hateful communications. The issue and the problem that always was there in the legislation is that it was using criminal law, the extreme end of social sanction, to prosecute, or put in fear of prosecution, people who may want to communicate ideas in a robust way, legitimate ideas that do not endanger anybody but might challenge other ideas. It is an essential feature of our democracy that there would be such freedom of expression, that we are willing and ready to hear ideas that we dislike or even that offend us. The complete vagueness of that legislation, the failure to define hatred, and the weird definition of gender that was imported into the legislation and which could put us right in the middle of the culture wars were the problems with the legislation. It shows the very politicised approach being taken by the Government that all it is doing is taking away that section of the Bill without even the guarantee that it is taking it away forever. If those on the Government side really believed such measures were necessary for the common good, they would be coming back with reasoned amendments, which I for one would be very willing to consider. Unless that weird definition of gender is gone from the remaining hate crimes remnant of this Bill, it remains highly problematic. Unless hatred is specifically defined so people can know what is criminal and what is not, or what will escalate an offence to being a more serious one and what will not, we will not have good quality criminal law.We must be vigilant on that.

People talk about the importation of culture wars into this country. I regret that there is ever any kind of culture war but those who talk about that should remember it was the importation of weird and unscientific ideas into policy-making in this country that has led to such controversies on social media. Hopefully, we will see a change in that, not just in the run-up to a general election but going forward.