In June of 2023, I wrote on these pages that if the Government’s Hate Speech bill were to have been passed, then Gript Media under my editorship would have deliberately flouted the law – specifically the provisions related to gender – and seek to be prosecuted.
This was not because I, or anyone on our staff, has any desire to say anything hateful about anybody, but because we considered the proposed law to be a fundamental attack on one of the most important and essential freedoms in a democracy – the right to speak one’s mind, free from persecution.
The price of that freedom as with any right or freedom, ultimately, is recognising that some will abuse it. This is true of all freedoms: Grant people the right to purchase alcohol, and some will become anti-social alcoholics. Grant people a social welfare system to help them when they are unemployed or otherwise unable to support themselves, and some will commit fraud. Grant people the right to freedom of speech, and some portion will express horrible and obnoxious ideas.
Yet it is also true that almost every dominant idea in society today was at one time a horrible and obnoxious idea in another time or place. The obvious example here is that current social mores around homosexuality represent ideas that were ruthlessly suppressed just over a century ago, where the idea of venues openly advertising themselves as gay bars would have resulted in their closure and the likely prosecution of their owners and customers on grounds of public decency. The idea that women could vote was, not so long ago, so controversial that untold numbers of people were imprisoned or otherwise mistreated simply for advocating it. As recently as 1958 in the United States, Richard and Mildred Loving saw Virginia State Troopers invade their home and literally drag them out of the bed they shared as a married couple for the crime of living together as a mixed race couple on the basis of that state’s law that “any white person who intermarries with a colored person shall be guilty of a felony”.
Indeed, the great irony is that most of modern progressivism and liberalism owes its cultural and societal dominance to free speech, and the right that said speech grants us to challenge injustices and dominant ways of thinking which are – we believe – misplaced.
Of course, it’s easy to defend free speech when that speech advocates progressivism and liberalism. What about when it does not?
Last week’s RTE documentary on the anti-immigration protests in Coolock featured a woman – who appears to look very like a woman Gript Media had interviewed separately at the same protest – making utterly horrendous and racist comments to black-skinned private security staff tasked with defending the proposed Coolock Asylum center. The woman calls the staff “dirty filthy n*ggers”, and says “youse are not wanted in this country, do you understand that?”
How can one defend speech like that?
Well, the answer is, I think, that such speech is in a way helpful. RTE chose to broadcast it for a reason, after all – they clearly agreed with me that her overt racism was helpful.
It is helpful because it shows the world who a person is, and what their concerns really are. The contrast between the woman Gript interviewed, saying that her and the local’s concerns were about services and capacity and public safety could not have been more perfectly undermined than they were by the woman who looked very like her, roaring about “dirty filthy n*ggers”. When people are free to express themselves clearly, the world can clearly see them and their ideas for what they truly are. Put legal constraints around what a person may say in public, and clarity about what they actually believe goes further out the window.
Consider these two women – who look very, very like the same person – and their respective arguments. One character makes an argument about capacity and services and whether it is wise for the state to accommodate people in a disused factory. The other goes on an openly racist and deranged rant. If we were to imagine for just a second that these two women were in fact the same person, then we would be quickly able to come to the conclusion that the case she made to Gript Media was in fact deeply dishonest. Free speech is the freedom to say things – not the freedom to be taken seriously when you say them.
The idea of a “marketplace of ideas” is, of course, a cliché, but it has survived as long as it has for a reason. RTE, we can safely say, did not broadcast a woman screaming about dirty filthy n*ggers because they thought lots of people sitting at home consuming the documentary would listen to that little speech and think “gee, this woman has a point which I had until now failed to consider”. No – they broadcast that utterly hateful rhetoric because they thought people sitting at home would listen to it and think “there must be a better way than this”.
Now, consider what happens to liberal democracy when you start taking people like the woman in Coolock and prosecuting her, and tossing her in prison: Her crime will have been – in her telling – that she said something bad about black people. Legions of defenders would rise in her support, chronicling every slight, real or imagined, uttered about white Irish people and declaiming the two-tier justice system. And they would, of course, have a point. When the Government seeks to criminalise a thought, or criminalise words, it does not send the signal that the words in question are dangerous for society. It sends the signal that the words in question are dangerous for the Government.
Beyond that basic defense of free speech, there are other reasons to celebrate the fall – for now – of this legislation.
First, that it shows that organised grassroots opposition to the Government can work.
Second, and perhaps most encouragingly, that it shows that Irish people as a collective have not yet entirely surrendered their appetite for liberties that have always been fundamental to the cause of Irish national freedom.
Third, that the case for calmly and rationally argued opposition to mainstream ideas has actually been strengthened, because we do not -for now – have to concern ourselves with defending the right of people to speak in the way our Coolock activist did. This should be an opportunity for people to focus on developing clear and effective ideas, rather than defending the right of people to make extreme statements, since that right is at least temporarily secured.
Because this is the final point I’d make: It is not simply enough to secure the existence of an open and unregulated “marketplace of ideas”. At some point, you have to actually win in that marketplace of ideas. Having the legal right to say something does not – and never has – entitled you to success in that marketplace.
Those of us who opposed this bill made a good and effective argument based on rationality, logic, and an ability to persuade the public that we were correct. Having done so, it might be wise to adopt that approach in other matters, and recognise that having the legal right to say something does not always make it a defensible thing to say.