Ireland’s Justice Minister Helen McEntee, the country’s lead sponsor of a bill that would criminalize “hate speech,” confirmed Saturday (21) that she had withdrawn from that part of the bill. Bill 105, named the “Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Crimes Act,” has been in the works since 2022 and was approved by the Irish House of Representatives (Dáil).
The minister, who is a member of a party considered to be centre-right (Fine Gael, “Irish family” in the local historical language), told local broadcaster RTÉ that “the hate speech element is not a consensus, so we will deal with that later”. However, she was “firm that hate crime legislation will come into force”, she said.
The law to be amended is the 1989 Prohibition of Incitement to Hate. The previous wording of the bill criminalised “endorsing, denying or trivialising to a serious extent genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace”. It is currently in the third stage of its passage in the Irish Senate.
Last year, entrepreneur Elon Musk criticized the project as “a massive attack on free speech.” McEntee said there had been “extensive public consultation and research,” but the conservative media outlet Gript showed that a government consultation in 2019 showed that 73% of Irish people surveyed did not support plans to criminalise hate speech.
In an interview with People’s GazetteGary Kavanagh, deputy editor of Griptthe government’s retreat was due to “public disapproval and the Justice Department’s concerns about the genocide article. I knew they were going to amend the bill, but I thought only this article would be dropped.”
He is referring to the text that intended to make it a crime to “endorse, deny or trivialize with aggravation genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace”. Kavanagh believes that the element of criminalizing hate speech could return to the bill, depending on a new government program to be presented by the coalition that governs the country.
Party with largest number of seats in Irish House of Representatives declines
After a campaign by critics, the centre-left Sinn Féin party (whose name means “We Ourselves” in Irish), which had voted for the bill in the House of Commons (where it holds 23% of seats, more than any other party) in April, backed down and called for it to be shelved. Pearse Doherty, the party’s spokesman, said its two senators did not support the bill and had voted against it in June. “We raised serious concerns about this legislation during its passage and proposed a number of amendments,” Doherty said.
Another minister in the coalition government running Ireland, Paschal Donohoe (Public Finance and Reform), also from Fine Gael, said: “We respectfully accept that some parts of the bill have failed to generate the consensus and agreement that is required for such an important piece of legislation, but its core purpose remains intact.”
The news of the abandonment of plans to criminalise hate speech was welcomed by Senator Michael McDowell, a former Justice Minister and non-partisan. “I asked Justice Minister Helen McEntee why she hadn’t defined the term ‘hate’ and she said two attorneys general had said it would make it harder for prosecutors to do so. If you look at what’s happening in the world, people are being prosecuted on the basis of very poor language… we can’t use language that restricts people’s freedom of speech and leave it to judges to decide.” [o que ela significa] at the end”.
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