According to the Gardaí, there were 582 reported “hate and hate related incidents” in 2022, which represented a 29% increase on the 448 in 2021.
It’s worth reminding ourselves of the Garda definition of what constitutes ‘hate’:
“A hate related discriminatory motive is recorded based on a perception test,” the Garda Press Office says.
Perception is the new reality, and all that.
“This means that if the victim or any other person perceives the incident was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on one of the nine protected characteristics it is recorded as such.”
And they go on to explain that:
“‘Any other person’ may include a witness, family members/relatives or friends, Garda personnel, Non-Governmental or Civil Society Organisations who have knowledge of the victim, alleged crime or scenario or a support worker or professional with particular knowledge of the victim, alleged crime or scenario.”
And there’s more:
“No corroborating evidence is required in order to make a report and we strongly encourage all those who have experienced hate related crimes/incidents to report these to us.”
‘No corroborating evidence’? That’s a dramatic shift in what might constitute a crime, and it has happened without debate save on this and a few other minor platforms, at the behest of NGOs who make a living out of seeing racism everywhere.
The Garda statistics are remarkably similar to the 600 incidents reported by the Irish Network Against Racism (INAR) and the 404 incidents that the organisation reported in 2021.
The Garda classification refers to all manner of “hate” crime based on the ethnicity, age, religion, sex, disability, sexual orientation, nationality or colour. Racism is the most frequent followed by homophobia. The INAR report is based solely on claims of racism.
If you think – and perception is the key word here as both reports are compiled mostly from self-reported incidents that did not lead to charges – that someone hates you for any other reason than the ones listed, then hard cheese.
It is unlikely either that if you reported that someone hated on you because they didn’t like your hair style or your shoes that your report would survive longer on the Garda PULSE than it would take to press the erase button.
That is not to doubt that people are abused and sometimes attacked physically or discriminated against for the reasons officially recognised, but they are only crimes if they break an actual law, not if they hurt somebody’s feelings. The Gardaí’s business is the first, not the second.
The striking similarity of the statistics reported by the Gardaí and those reported by a leftist activist group may be coincidental but they share both the same basic motivation in creating a whole new category of crime, and the value placed on self-reporting with no other evidence.
This lack of evidence would not be acceptable were you to claim, for example, that your house had been broken into. You would have to show some evidence of that before it becomes part of official crime statistics, never mind anyone being pinched for it.
The two sets of statistics, apart from the leftie group’s obsession with bigging up racism, are clearly unrelated anyway, if for no other reason than that the Irish Network Against Racism claims that only 20% of the racist crimes that were reported to them were reported to the Gardaí.
Which would actually mean that the Gardaí ought to have received far fewer reports of racist hate crimes than they did – or that the INAR’s own statistics are wildly inaccurate.
That aside, the key takeaway is that the Gardaí have adopted the INAR’s method of recording these incidents. This is known as iReporting.
The INAR were also boasting as far back as 2013 of having influenced the Gardaí to adopt the racial left’s definition of a racist incident as “any incident which has the effect of undermining anyone’s enjoyment or human rights, based on their background.”
If that sounds like a very subjective definition of a “crime”, then that it what it is meant to be, as the INAR and Garda definition of a racist incident is the one imposed upon the British police by the 1999 MacPherson report which is based on an event “that is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.”
The INAR admitted in 2013 that such incidents “may not meet the criteria for being considered criminal offences” but of course they and others in power have manged subsequently to ensure that this is no longer the case. There are now effectively thought crimes that can land up in court, and have done so already in Britain, which as ever is the touchstone for the Irish left and much of the administrative elite.
So while we may mock at the attempts by some to turn a bar person mistaking Ribena for red wine as “racist” and therefore grounds for whatever the complainant was hoping would ensue from their charge, such spurious subjectivism is now the basis for possible criminal prosecution. This is how totalitarian legal systems operate.
Credit all the same to the INAR. They are yet another group of left activists who have managed to persuade a rudderless political elite to sign up to an ideological agenda. There are those on the far-left, of course, whose ultimate aim to undermine democratic western societies in the belief that social collapse will lead to their coming to power. The ramblings of Paul Murphy and his communist organisation confirm this.
Human rights, actual or made up, are nothing more than a Trojan Horse for these people. Their ideology does not recognise the western concept of human rights which is based on individual rather than spurious collective rights.
Unfortunately the bankrupt establishment parties are happy not only to regurgitate all of this, and to frame legislation in line with it, but to fund it through your tax Euros. The Irish Network Against Racism does namecheck the people who pay their bills: you and you.
In their last financial report from 2019 they were given €270,000 in state funding. They are also part of the broader European Network Against Racism (ENAR) which is over 70% funded by the European Commission. Now, bear in mind, that these people not only claim to be “non-governmental,” but also to be not only on the left but, in not a few cases, to be members or supporters of the “revolutionary left.”
Now, you may take that with a grain of salt given the social background, state dependency, and elite positioning of such characters within Irish and western society generally. And in any event, what sort of self-respecting communists and anarchists and Irish republicans have their bills paid not only by the Irish state, but by the European Commission; are “partnered” in several instances with the British Home Office, and also as the ENAR finances show, get considerable amounts of money from the corporate foundations?
With regard to what you get from the INAR in return for your money, their annual glossy reports are little more than a cut and paste of all of the others. The only things that really change are the happily round figures of racist hate crimes – 600 in 2022 and 700 in 2020.
These actually fell to 404 in 2021 but just as you might have been hoping that racist hate crime was about to join socialism in the dustbin of history, and possibly even make all of those tasked with smashing racism and punching the fash redundant, there was a Stakhanovite leap of 74% in racist hate last year.
This, apparently, is mostly thanks to the “far right actors” with their buggies and babies and boxer dogs who have temporarily forgotten that they are part of some “Red Wall” and have been protesting against the undocumented toiling masses being landed on their doorstep. The cheek of them. Trying to take the bread from the mouths of our heroes who are busily documenting their racist ways.
But sure, even if that were to happen they could join An Garda Síochána and swell the fighting ranks of their 481 “Diversity Officers.” After all, they’ve pretty much written the job spec.