The crisis of free speech in Ireland

Michael Shellenberger called a proposed law to criminalise "hate speech" in Ireland as the worst law he's ever seen. The arms race of offence escalates ever upward.

Anyone who is not overly familiar with modern Ireland may well think of it as a green and pleasant land that has successfully blended its ancient, unique, traditional culture with a tech-savvy, open-minded and youth-friendly update that’s left behind its conservative past. Ireland has a gay prime minister, a vibrant arts scene, a highly educated workforce and lots of vegan mums and feminist dads who like to swim in the bracing Irish Sea before dropping off their kids at non-religious schools or taking them to Pride parades. It’s been given a hipster makeover that many people think makes Ireland a great place to live. Up to a point, that is true — but like with all things youthful and tech-savvy —much of Irish policy is being shaped by wealthy NGO’s with woke agendas that threaten to be as oppressive as the darkest days of the Catholic Church locking up women for having babies out of wedlock. 

Free speech in Ireland is under grave threat.

Yes, the country perhaps most famous for its way with words, the land that birthed the authors of Ulysses and the Ballad of Reading Gaol, the tiny nation that won the sympathy of the world for its struggle against unjust foreign rule, may soon be the land where you could be jailed for being in possession of spicy memes.

That’s because the Irish government is proposing a law that would vastly increase the power of law enforcement to search people and seize their devices upon reports of hate speech. Among its many terrible aspects, the worst to me are that it removes the burden of proof from the state to the accused, and it does not even define the “hate” it criminalises, so in theory anyone could be jailed for saying something that someone else feels is hateful. The bill states: “‘hatred’ means 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.”

The definition of hatred in this bill is…hatred. 

On Saturday I attended an event in Dublin called Ireland Uncensored that brought together some of the most well-known figures in the non-corporate media ecosystem to discuss how dangerous this bill is, and how close this island nation is to seeing this fundamental human right taken away.

American journalist Michael Shellenberger travelled to Ireland in order to lend his support to Ireland’s beleaguered free speech supporters, and he called the bill “the worst law I have seen in my entire career.” 

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When hate crime laws started to become a thing years ago, I was immediately skeptical even though I was still firmly in the liberal camp. To have additional penalties added on to an already illegal act, because of the beliefs of the person perpetrating the crime, seemed to me an obvious slide in the direction of thought crime. Since then, the slide has only gotten slippier, and now we live in a reality where satire, rancour, disagreement and humour are widely accepted by the liberal, professional managerial class to be tantamount to violence, and deserving of criminal prosecution. We have been living through an escalating arms race of offence, and the educated upper middle classes have studiously avoided noticing it. 

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties goes so far as to state of the bill: “we welcome the clarification that an offence can be committed where no person has been incited to hatred or where no actual instance of harm or unlawful discrimination has occurred.” In other words, according to the guardians of Irish civil liberties, crime has occurred even when no crime has occurred, and that’s great news! 

Very coincidentally, in the run up to the Ireland Uncensored meeting, something happened in my personal life that perfectly summed up just how much this mentality has seeped into both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. Where I live, in Northern Ireland, an adult reported my 14-year-old son to the Northern Irish police for messages he had intended as a joke. I do not want to go into any detail, and so far nothing has come of it, thankfully. But that’s where we are, as a society, and it’s grim.

Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, and therefore would not fall under the jurisdiction of the Irish hate speech bill, but the situation in the UK is worse than in Ireland. There have been many examples, but one of the most egregious is the case of Marion Millar, a middle-aged Scottish mother and feminist who was arrested and charged because  of Tweets she had posted, including a photo of ribbons in suffragette colours which was perceived as resembling a noose by another Twitter user. In June 2021 she was arrested and charged under the Malicious Communications Act, and, as reported by the Sunday Times, “was told that social workers would be sent to care for her young twin boys, who are autistic, while she was questioned. Millar has claimed she has hardly been able to sleep or eat since officers opened the investigation.” The charges were “discontinued” in October of that year: however, as is often pointed out by people who run afoul of these thought-crime prosecutions, the process is the punishment. 

Ireland’s fun, new, progressive, political class seems intent on following in the UK’s jack-booted footsteps, and the Irish media are mostly fine with it. Well, all but media upstart gript.ie, a news site that has stood virtually alone in covering the dangers of this bill and which hosted the event last weekend. Not coincidentally, the Irish left have been keen to characterise Gript as a “wannabe Fox News,” a clear dog-whistle to all good Irish progressives not to touch any Gript content with a ten foot pole, lest they too be tarnished by the ‘far-right’ label. 

During a panel discussion on the Irish bill at Saturday’s event, speakers were made of up those whose main focus was the Irish government’s policy on migrants and those who, like speakers Helen Joyce and Stella O’Malley, are concerned with the liberal’s west’s embrace of sex change for minors. 

Both of these issues have become shibboleths of the progressive establishment and any criticism of them has been attacked as ‘far-right’ in Ireland, just as it has in every other western country. So any discussion of these issues in particular are in danger of becoming illegal should the bill pass — especially because the protected characteristics include gender identity, ethnicity, nationality and “descent.” 

The bill is currently with the upper house of the Irish parliament, having already passed the lower house in the spring. And while the government has attempted to allay fears by pointing to the very brief mention of artistic, academic or political discussion, that carve-out does not read as particularly robust.

On Saturday when I was making my way to the RDS — a concert hall in a leafy well-to-do neighbourhood where the event was held — I jumped in a taxi driven by a woman originally from Uganda. Apologies for using the tired journalistic cliché of quoting the cab driver, but the conversation I had with this woman is too relevant to leave out. She and I were discussing Dublin’s crime and drug problem, which has plagued the city for decades and which I personally experienced when I lived there in the mid-1990’s. The taxi driver told me she had been in Dublin for twenty years and had seen the problem get worse during that time. She really noticed it getting bad, she said, when the Polish immigrants began arriving. I would beg to differ, as I lived in Dublin years before any immigrants started arriving, and the drug problem was bad then too. But what her opinion showed was that the issue of mass migration is far more complex that the progressive policy-making class would like to believe. And as such, robust and free debate on the matter is absolutely necessary.

My black, female, taxi driver’s quite un-PC opinion of immigration was also further evidence of something many of us already know: there is an inconvenient divergence between the opinions of the white saviour middle class liberals and people of all colours who are beneath them on the socio-economic ladder. For the cosseted liberal, every migrant is a worthy saint bringing diversity, peace and love to their new home, and it’s the sacred duty of the upper class liberals to embrace them. The taxi driver proved that the reality for those outside the government-media-NGO complex differs sharply from their condescending fantasies. 

And according to a story published by Gript last May, the divergence between the public and the policy class is reflected in widespread opposition to the hate crime bill. When the Irish government put the bill out for public consultation and asked for submissions, of the 3600 responses, 73 percent did not support it. Nonetheless, the bill was passed last spring in the lower house of the Irish legislature with “an overwhelming 110 votes in favour, with only 14 TD’s opposed,” Gript reported.

Obviously, this is a feature, not a bug, of the legislation. As the editor of Gript, John McGuirk, told attendees on Saturday: "They’re trying to shut you up because they’re afraid of you.”

A similar point was made by Shellenberger, who drew parallels between the private American NGO’s and their sway over policy makers in the United States — as shown by his Twitter files reporting — and similarly influential groups in Ireland. “This is an incredibly important concept to understand: the people demanding the censorship are the same people spreading the disinformation,” Shellenberger said. 

“If we can’t stop this terrible law in Ireland,” he continued, “I fear for western civilisation.”