Over the past week, Justice Minister Helen McEntee has repeatedly and dubiously claimed that the response to her government’s public consultation on hate speech laws was “significantly positive.”
In an article published in the Sunday Times over the weekend, McEntee wrote that it was “incorrect” to say that the government ignored the public consultation results:
With this legislation, we are protecting those most vulnerable to hate crime and hate speech and respecting the very generous Irish tradition of live and let live.
My article in today’s @ST_Ireland https://t.co/ozUjSGSWA0
— Helen McEntee TD (@HMcEntee) June 25, 2023
She explained this comment in more detail while addressing Senators last Wednesday:
So, McEntee’s position is that the public consultation by her Department had five “strands,” four of which were “overwhelmingly positive.” And therefore, she argues, the public consultation overall was positive.
But to understand how seriously flawed this reasoning is, let’s take a look at the five “strands” in question.
The categories she’s referring to here are as follows: “Submissions From Individuals,” “Submissions From Groups,” “Submissions From Elected Officials,” “Submissions From Academics,” and “Online Survey Responses.” Let’s go through them one-by-one, starting with “Elected Officials.”
This “strand” of the consultation, as the name implies, involves responses from exactly 10 politicians and political groups. And no, that’s not a typo – only ten responses were received.
These responses are from politicians, including Fianna Fáil TD Jim O’Callaghan, Fine Gael TD Martin Heydon, Green Party Councillor Hazel Chu, The Green Party in general as an overall entity, and ex-TD Finian McGrath, who was an Independent, but who was appointed as a government Junior Minister by Fine Gael and held that role as recently as 2020 until he lost his seat. Senator Lynn Ruane was in the mix as well.
So in effect, for this “consultation,” a tiny handful of politicians weighed in, around half of which are actually members of the government, and surprise surprise – most of them said they wanted hate speech laws. This is one of McEntee’s “overwhelmingly positive strands” that she referred to in an effort to bolster her point.
The next item on the list that we can look at is “Submissions From Academics”, which is even more of a stretch. For this particular strand of the consultation, the government received literally 5 submissions. Not 500, mind you. Not 50. Five. This, again, was apparently “overwhelmingly positive.”
And then, as for the strand relating to “groups,” the Department of Justice received just 51 responses. These include a whole swathe of government-funded NGOs, including the National Youth Council of Ireland, which receives over €2.7 million per year in government funding, and a further €300,000 from the European Commission, as outlined previously on Gript.
“If we are white, we carry white privilege”: An Irish advocacy group in receipt of millions in taxpayer funding has accused all white people of having “privilege,” and links to documents saying that “whiteness” is part of “racist oppression.”#gripthttps://t.co/pjqlle4nZo
— gript (@griptmedia) May 15, 2023
Other groups in receipt of state funding include LGBTQI+ advocacy organisations, including LGBT Ireland, Dublin Lesbian Line, The Gay Project, BeLongTo, and Amach LGBT. Still more included a variety of state-funded migrant and traveller advocacy groups, such as the Cultúr Migrants Centre, NASC, Cairde, the Migrant Rights Centre, the Galway Traveller Movement, and Traveller Visibility Group Cork.
Not only do all of these groups receive money directly from the State, but it’s in their own self-interest to advocate for hate speech laws. If you’re an organisation that represents migrants, travellers, or gay people, then the need for hate speech laws justifies your continued existence and strengthens the case for you to receive more taxpayer money.
Other organisations in the “groups” category include foreign bodies like the UN, and media groups like the Independent.ie and the National Union of Journalists.
So basically, this strand of the consultation asked a handful of NGOs which the government pays millions of euros to annually – groups which directly benefit from hate speech laws – and a group of mainstream media journalists and foreign political entities. And this, again, is one of McEntee’s “overwhelmingly positive” consultations. It’s not particularly credible, really, isn’t it?
When you exclude these obviously silly examples, which are not even worth discussing, we come to the only strand of the consultation which really matters in a democracy: what the public thinks.
Submissions From Individuals came to about 104 letters and emails sent in by anonymous members of the public, and in addition to this there were about 3,500 or so survey responses.
This is the material that I went through last month, when I published a Gript article pointing out that during the consultation, the government received overwhelmingly negative responses from the general public. Out of the thousands of replies from individuals, around 73% were negative, with the vast majority of respondents saying they do not want the hate speech law.
GRIPT EXCLUSIVE: The Irish government is driving ahead with the proposed hate speech bill, even after more than 73% of responses to their public consultation expressed negative views about the idea.#gripthttps://t.co/rcKnzWZ954
— gript (@griptmedia) May 3, 2023
And I know this, because I personally spent hours going through every single response individually. I literally read them all.
When I put this to Taoiseach Leo Varadkar the same week, and asked why his government bothered doing a consultation just to ignore the results, he defended the move, arguing that “very often” such processes are hijacked by “campaigning groups,” and as such are not “reflective of public opinion.”
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar defends disregarding the results of the public consultation on "hate speech" laws, arguing that "very often" such consultations are hijacked by "campaigning groups" and are not "reflective of public opinion."#gript pic.twitter.com/X6EC0uF6NO
— gript (@griptmedia) May 4, 2023
And in fairness, he would know that there were “campaigning groups” involved in the consultation, because it was his own government tagging them asking them to weigh in. The Department was tagging NGOs which are known to support hate speech laws in an effort to get them to flood the consultation with their own responses.
We’re running a public consultation on hate speech to find out how our laws can be improved. You and your followers can tell us what you think 👉 https://t.co/LONuwIcN2T @_IHREC @PaveePoint @itmtrav @VoiceTraveller @NTWFIRL @ExchangeHouseIr pic.twitter.com/hsUWu6i1ud
— Department of Justice 🇮🇪 (@DeptJusticeIRL) November 12, 2019
Public Consultation on Hate Speech: Your feedback is vital in ensuring legislation meets the needs of Irish society. You and your followers can have your say 👉 https://t.co/uxczRekvCF @immigrationIRL @IrishRefugeeCo @MigrantRightsIr @NascIreland @INARIreland @ARNirl @sariireland pic.twitter.com/7M4Nx8K9FQ
— Department of Justice 🇮🇪 (@DeptJusticeIRL) November 6, 2019
So Varadkar seems to be saying that the consultation with members of the public didn’t really count because it didn’t go his way. We all know that if 73% of responses were positive, then the government would say that the consultation was as good as gold. It’s only “unreliable” because it backfired on them.
And yet McEntee is trying to downplay the significance of this, calling it “misinformation,” because she has 4 consultations that more or less had a pre-arranged outcome, and thus got the desired result.
Her argument is literally: “We did one consultation involving thousands of normal people, and that was negative. But then we did 4 others involving a handful of our friends and groups that directly stand to benefit from the law, and they were positive. So overall, the consultation was positive.”
It is a clearly ridiculous argument, seemingly designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the public. And it wouldn’t be the first time, either.
For years the Department of Justice was actually bragging about the number of consultation responses they received, tweeting:
“Today @HMcEntee launches findings of consultation that received over 3.6k submissions that will lead to new hate crime laws in Ireland. Legislation is now being developed.”
🤬 Hate Speech can lead to hate crime. Today @HMcEntee launches findings of consultation that received over 3.6k submissions that will lead to new hate crime laws in Ireland.
⚖️ Legislation is now being developed.
For report 👉 https://t.co/brLrW1hDp4 pic.twitter.com/LHcie8JWx4
— Department of Justice 🇮🇪 (@DeptJusticeIRL) December 17, 2020
So, in other words, they used the sheer volume of responses to imply support for the law, assuming that nobody would actually go to the trouble of looking at the content of the submissions. They were effectively saying “Hey look guys, we’re inundated with thousands of messages about this law! Isn’t that great?”, neglecting to mention that almost three quarters of those responses were telling them to take a hike. They tried to trick people and falsely act like their law had widespread support, when it clearly didn’t.
The whole argument is remarkably flimsy, and the fact that our media classes as a whole will probably let McEntee away with it is truly a poor indictment of the press in this country.