The Hate Speech Bill is a charter for cancel culture

WE MAY be getting ourselves all up in a heap about nothing. By ‘we’ I mean those of us who have profound reservations about the so-called Hate Speech Bill (and what a motley crew we are, but more on that in a moment). After all this fuss, I suspect it’ll never happen. Incoming taoiseach Simon Harris this week pledged to see the legislation through, and showed off those placatory manners of his, to which we’re all soon to become accustomed, at their best. There there, revisions, amendments, shh, it’ll be fine.

The Bill sailed through the Dáil last year, where it was passed by an impressive 110 votes to 14. It’s a mark of our parliamentary system that we can’t tell whether that was because 110 TDs were passionately in favour of it or because they had funerals to get to and couldn’t be arsed looking into it properly, although recent evidence suggests the latter.

Then it got rather bogged down in the Seanad, and it has not yet reached committee stage there. If it’s to be revised and amended as Simon promises, it’ll have to go back to the Dáil again after that so that more TDs can be seen to have changed their minds about it. Add in a long summer recess and a spring election and, oops, I’m sorry, your time is up.

DON’T put the placards away yet though, because anti-hate crime legislation has to be brought in – not only because it’s needed but because Brussels is tapping its foot. We were supposed to have given legislative effect to the European Council framework on this matter by 2010. The EU framework, though, is about hatred based on racism and xenophobia and refers only to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin. Our own existing incitement to hatred act from 1989 does much the same, usefully adding sexual orientation and membership of the Travelling community as grounds for protection against incitement.

But Helen McEntee’s Bill goes a lot further, adding to the long list of ‘protected characteristics’ disability, which is a good and necessary extension, and gender, which is a seriously problematic one. Note not ‘sex’, but ‘gender’. Your sex – as in your inescapable biological destiny to be either male or female, and potentially to suffer discrimination as a result – is not a protected characteristic but your gender is.

And here’s how gender is defined in the Bill – brace yourself if you haven’t seen this already: ‘“Gender” means the gender of a person or the gender which a person

expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female’.

That’s nothing if not broad and inclusive, no? Anybody left out there? Any omnigender or twospirit folk feeling they might have been unforgivably overlooked? It’s remarkable, really, that an anti-hatred Bill that has deliberately – and perplexingly – neglected to define the word ‘hatred’ itself has nevertheless been so very thorough about this aspect of the wording.

And you don’t have to go so far as to publish material with the intention of inciting hatred against a protected group: being ‘reckless’

as to whether hatred would be incited is enough; even possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred is enough, before ever you publish it. Search warrants can be issued. Computers can be seized. Jail terms can be imposed.

This is where you get to pick a team you see. Because the opponents of this Bill come in many stripes, including those who fear an erosion of freedom of speech; those who foresee thought crime and a police state; those who don’t want to have to conspire in the mass delusion that is transgender ideology; those who think it might be better to talk to people than silence them; those who think ‘hatred’ should be properly defined before we start legislating about it; and those who object on two or more or all of those grounds.

We’re all lumped in together so that you find yourself in strange company – on the same side as people like the suddenly ubiquitous Michael McDowell, and (shudder) Ronan Mullen, and (at least temporarily, till the wind changes again) Sinn Féin.

And collectively we’re having our intelligence insulted over it. In his parting shot at Sinn Féin for switching sides on the Bill, outgoing Taoiseach Leo Varadkar accused the party of cowardice for ‘buckling’ because of ‘an online campaign of misinformation’. He added that he thinks the Bill is ‘misunderstood by a lot of people’.

Things being misunderstood by the great unwashed is of course the soup of the day in Leinster House since the two referendums. As they see it, the problem is not the legislation but that we don’t understand the legislation. We’re too busy imbibing malicious fictions on social media instead of reading up. That’s us told.

SINN Féin was also accused of flipping to the right over its U-turn on the Bill. But Sinn Féin’s precarious equilibrium aside, is it not very much to be regretted that support for freedom of speech has somehow become associated with the right? It has happened, presumably, because of the Trumpy types who want to defend their freedom to deride people from ‘s***hole countries’ on Telegram. But free speech is neither a right-wing nor a left-wing principle but a fundamentally democratic one – and a unifying one. As we’ve seen and continue to see, both left and right are equally capable of being censorious when it serves them. We would find out soon enough, if this Bill were to be enacted, how much freedom we would have left to say disagreeable things about people who class themselves as victims. Justice Minister Helen McEntee has perpetually tried to downplay the prospect of spurious accusations of hatred from trans rights activists, but I’m afraid she’s being hopelessly overtaken by events. What people wanted – and what was needed – was a way to protect racial and ethnic minorities from attack; what we got instead was a legislative charter for cancel culture. We can watch with interest while this Bill is gradually turned into a camel and pushed down the road out of sight, but we should keep an eye on it.

Computers can be seized. Jail terms can be imposed

MARY CARR IS AWAY