Relax, Ireland, you’re not as racist or sexist as extremists say

Constantly seeing hate where none exists can easily end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, writes Eilis O’Hanlon

‘Ireland is still a tolerant country in which political extremes have little foothold’

THE abuse directed at the mixed race couple who appeared in an advert for Lidl intensified calls for a toughening of hate crime legislation. Now Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan has launched a public consultation on what should be done as part of a wider review by his department into hate speech.

Politicians love consultation exercises, because they give the impression that they’re listening to ordinary people, when usually they’re just listening to one another. Or, at the very least, to people who are saying what they want to hear. In practice, it’s professionals and activists in particular fields who tend to dominate these consultations, and they’re many things, but rarely neutral observers.

The danger with embarking on this multi-dimensional approach to tackling hate speech is that it ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you go looking for racism, misogyny, homophobia, you’ll invariably find it.

That then feeds into a narrative that says the country is a bigoted backwater. Politicians soon feel pressure to respond to that perception, which in turn fuels a further rise in figures showing bigotry to be endemic. It’s a cycle that feeds on itself. Whether that says as much about the country as some might choose to believe is debatable.

Campaigners certainly used the example of the couple on the Lidl posters, one of whom was born in Brazil, to argue that hate speech was rampant in Ireland and needed to be stamped out through tougher legislation.

Enter the Minister for Justice to announce on RTE’s Drivetime that he intends to do just that. In the long term, that might be the right thing. Being on the receiving end of hate speech is, after all, not a pleasant experience. The psychological impact on victims is known to be far greater than for everyday crimes. There ought to be consequences.

It’s equally important to make it easier for victims to report their ordeals to gardai, and for the authorities to collate and analyse the data. None of those good intentions should be questioned.

Whether the measures being proposed will do what they say on the tin is another matter entirely. Much of the worst excesses happen online, which is notoriously difficult to police or prosecute. Amid a blaze of publicity in 2017, the Mayor of London launched his new Online Hate Crime Hub, the first of its kind in the UK, with a mission to “work with community experts” to crack down on offensive speech.

Since then, the unit has spent £1.7m of public money, and has resulted in just six successful prosecutions, none of which led to imprisonment.

There is a similar danger here of playing up the extent of racist and misogynistic abuse. Minister Flanagan told RTE last Thursday that “hate speech is becoming common in Ireland”, then went on to say it was coming from a “vociferous minority”.

Which is it?

Just because there may be a reported rise in hate speech does not automatically mean that there is more of it about. Sometimes it just means that the gardai have got better at gathering information. Public awareness campaigns will also inevitably prompt a rise in complaints about certain behaviours, some of which might not be criminal at all.

Unfortunately, it’s becoming harder to apply objective criteria when it comes to defining hate crimes and hate speech. Earlier this month, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris introduced the force’s new working definition of a hate crime. That’s now deemed to be “any criminal offence perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on disability, race, colour, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender”. That worrying little aside (“or any other person”) means that, even if the victim of an offence doesn’t think it was a hate crime, it will still be investigated as such, and be so recorded, if “any other person” believes it to be so.

This makes a crime dependent on an individual’s subjective perception of what happened rather than an objective assessment of what actually did happen. That can only have the effect of driving up hate crime figures even if the actual incidence of hate crime or hate speech stays the same or goes down.

For the first time, the Garda will also now record so-called “noncrime hate incidents” on the Pulse database. These are even more nebulous. If gardai follow the UK template in this area, as they have with the definition of a hate crime, that would mean adopting British operational guidelines which state that “evidence of the hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incidents”.

Including incidents in official figures where there is an absence of evidence does not feel much like progress.

The gardai are not even denying that their aim is to see hate crime figures go up, with Commissioner Harris telling reporters at the launch of the new strategy that one of his own concerns was the under reporting of such incidents.

Once it’s assumed that there’s a vast underbelly of hate crime that’s not being reported, any subsequent improvements in the collection of data will be used to push an agenda which paints Irish society as a hotbed of prejudice, which in due course feeds into the demand for something to be done to, as the Minister for Justice pledged last week, “outlaw” hate speech.

Charlie Flanagan insists that he has no desire to curb free speech, but the law of unintended consequences tends to kick in on such occasions. A clampdown, however well meaning, can have a chilling effect on open dialogue about contentious issues.

In many instances, the consequences may not even be unintended. Campaigners often highlight such issues deliberately in order to suppress certain points of view.

The real danger is not free speech, though, it’s about what it does to a society’s perception of itself. The ultimate aim may be to make Irish people think of themselves and each other as more backward in their attitudes than they really are.

True bigotry, sexism and homophobia should be called out wherever they appear, but sometimes the net is drawn so wide that it’s worth stopping to ask if what is being confronted is any of those things at all. Opposing same sex marriage in the 2015 referendum was regarded in many quarters as homophobic by definition. These are not healthy developments.

A recent report in America looked at the damage being done by the sort of extreme self-loathing and liberal guilt which has gripped white progressives in recent times, and which is pushing them further to the extremes in their attitudes than the minorities they claim to be speaking up for.

Ireland is still a tolerant, open, relaxed country in which the political extremes of left and right have little foothold. That’s no ground for complacency; but seeing racism and sexism everywhere, out of all proportion to its actual prevalence, is a recipe for the same stridency rampaging through American life.

Figures for 2016 in Ireland show that there were 13 reports of anti-Muslim incidents, and fewer than three of transphobia. Ireland needs proper laws against hate crimes, but, however noble the intentions of those pushing for hate speech to be the Garda’s number one priority, the country doesn’t need to be told repeatedly that the Irish are homophobic and racist bigots, because there’s very little evidence that we are.