The bad news for opponents of the Government’s Hate Speech bill is that on paper, all of the odds favour its comfortable passage: Having been almost five years in development across two separate Governments and three Justice Ministers, it is clearly and unambiguously a priority for the civil service, who have driven its implementation from day one. The Government has clear majorities in both houses of the Oireachtas. The media are, at the very best, ambivalent about the bill, and at their worst openly enthusiastic for it, safe in the knowledge that it is not their speech that the bill is intended to restrict. The bill also has the unfettered enthusiasm of almost every state funded lobby group that has voiced an opinion, up to and including the hilariously misnamed “Irish Council for Civil Liberties”.
What’s more, the hour is late: Barring some accepted amendment in the Seanad, the bill is not scheduled to return to the Dáil for another vote. A Seanad vote in favour is sufficient to send it to the desk of President Higgins, who will, we can safely say, keep his mouth shut on this particular issue of public policy. Freedom of speech for the public is, ironically, on course to be restricted by the same fellow who has decided to advance and expand the free speech of the Presidency.
The issue with this, people should remember, is that it makes Sinn Fein’s belated, and possibly cynical, opposition, irrelevant: If the bill passes, it will have passed in large part because Sinn Fein voted for it in the Dáil. And, I fear, if it passes, it will pass because Sinn Fein abstains, rather than votes against it, in the Seanad.
But for all of that, though the odds of the bill being stopped are long, they are not non-existent. It is abundantly clear, both from private conversations and on-the-record statements, that Government TDs are feeling extreme heat in relation to this piece of legislation.
Senator Lisa Chambers, normally the most loyalist of Fianna Fáil representatives, has called for the bill to be paused. Her colleague, FF Senator Donal O’Donovan, has indicated that he may vote against it. Fine Gael’s Regina Doherty, normally the most mindlessly devoted advocate of anything that might be branded progressive, has expressed concern and shock at the sheer scale of opposition to the bill that she has encountered. Significantly, in almost all of the public debates over the bill, its supporters have noticeably come across second-best.
The Opposition in both houses has been well-organised and coherent. It has drawn together people who would usually differ on many issues – voices like Ronan Mullen, Michael McDowell, Sharon Keogan, and, in the Dáil, even the likes of Paul Murphy. By contrast, supporters of the bill have repeatedly flubbed and made errors – comments about how it is designed to restrict freedom, or ban jokes, for example.
Privately, two Government TDs described it to me respectively as “a disaster” and “an own goal” respectively, and expressed serious relief that it is not coming back to the Dáil because if it did, they felt, several Government TDs would be minded to vote against it.
The entire reason for the present wobble is public pressure: Many bad laws are eruditely opposed at the time of their passage, but few laws capture the public imagination in the way that the hate speech bill has. What’s more, the opposition to it has largely been organic, and not as a result of hostile coverage from the usual main media organisations – RTE, for example, has barely mentioned it. Politicians have noticed this element more than any other.
This reflects not only the unpopularity of the bill, but a shift in the way the public engages. Almost a decade ago, another piece of legislation – the gender recognition act – sailed through the Oireachtas with similarly erudite opposition within the chambers, but almost no pushback from outside Leinster House. That bill, like this one, had the quiet assent of most of the media, and as such no public debate ever really took hold.
One TD tells me that he thinks that the ultimate effect of the Seanad Debate and the public controversy might not be to stop the bill from passing, but rather to render it practically unenforceable: “Unless they find some slam dunk case of a person saying Muslims should be shot or something, I don’t know how they’ll get a prosecution through”, he notes. “The first person they prosecute will end up a martyr”.
The same TD fears that the net effect of the bill might end up being to increase the very kind of speech it is trying to suppress: “You’ll have all the usual suspects trying to get themselves arrested for the notoriety”, he says.
The other TD, though, believes that the bill might not pass at all: “The delay option is increasingly attractive”, he says. “Chambers and others are pushing for it. And the Government has enough fights on its hands”.
“But if it does get delayed, I wouldn’t put money on it coming back at all”.
It remains to be seen who is right.