I genuinely do not know what is more terrifying. One, the ability of Dáil Éireann to pass a hate-speech law that was so inept that it was instantly torpedoed by the Seanad. Two, the reiterated determination of the Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, come what may, to place a similar hate-speech law before the next Dáil. Three, a Dail bill based on the following, an abbreviated but otherwise verbatim foreword. I have spent two days trying to understand it. I failed. Here it is.
“The Bill entitled an Act to amend the law relating to the prohibition of incitement to violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of certain characteristics (referred to as protected characteristics) of the person or the group of persons and to provide for an offence of condoning, denying or grossly trivialising genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace and, in doing so, to give effect to (laws) on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law; to provide for certain offences aggravated by hatred ….and to provide for amendments of those and other enactments (and) in respect of other offences for hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of protected characteristics of the person or the group of persons to be an aggravating factor in sentencing for those offences…”
What would a politically-motivated judge make of such lethal gibberish? Don’t say there are no such judges. They’re everywhere these days, and their legal pinnacle, the European Court of Human Rights, is the primary reason why immigration into the EU is running out of control and threatens to destroy the cultural heartland of western civilisation.
Moreover, Ireland is well ahead of the euro-pack, eradicating dissenting speech through a sinister but informal alliance of politicians and the media. This axis (a most useful word) in 2017 ended my career as a newspaper columnist, and even exulted as I went down in flames. No doubt, with this axis as her future ally, McEntee clearly intends to re-introduce her already failed hate-speech laws. Any why not? As a woman minister, she can’t be sacked, because sacking a woman can only ever be misogyny.
Seven years ago, in a commissioned column in The Sunday Times I praised two broadcasters in the BBC for their chutzpah in being the best paid women in the BBC – hardly surprising, I said, seeing that they were Jewish. It passed muster through all the editorial levels of The Sunday Times, but then ran into an online ambush, presumably because somebody in that newspaper had already arranged it. The Irish edition came out at 12.01 on the Sunday morning. By 12.02am, my column had been accessed and denounced in London as anti-Semitic. Two already-poised journalists with The Financial Times then weighed in, starting an on-line lynching which within hours brought about my public dismissal for ever by The Sunday Times.
Meanwhile, the mob gathered more recruits, shrieking denunciations of me. These included the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, the Tanaiste, Frances Fitzerald, the Labour leader Joan Bruton, the former Secretary General of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Chair of the Press Council of Ireland, Sean Donlon, and naturally, the long-term IRA sympathiser Roy Greenslade. As you can see, I don’t get just any old lynch-mob.
I can’t name every journalist who joined the lynch-mob, but I must mention Fintan O’Toole of The Irish Times. Within four days, this fine fellow scribbled two entire columns denouncing me for my “misogyny”, a vice he had never accused me of before, which didn’t stop him from jeering that if I had stuck to that, I would still have a career.
RTE’s programmes – under the guidance of that exemplar of broadcasting ethics, Director General Dee Forbes – spent a month systematically eviscerating me. Unsurprisingly, Ryan Turbridy’s Late Late Show joined in, inviting one of the broadcasters, Vanessa Feltz to join the mob. She could not possibly have known of the vigorous defence of me by the Jewish Representative Council, or that for over twenty years, I had been one of Israel’s few defenders In Ireland.
Time, in all its generosity, has revealed what we know about Forbes and Tubridy. No matter, for I was a perfect target: anti-Provo, not gay, not a woman, not black, et cetera.
So naturally, my generic species – heterosexual Irish males – were the next target after the murder of Aisling Murphy in Offaly, with O’Toole describing the terrible fate of women at the hands of Irishmen. He described how he lived in a “safe” middle-class area of Dublin, but nearby the body of a mother of four was dumped beside a skip, with her husband being convicted of her murder. Round the corner, “lives another man”, who sexually-assaulted a young woman in public.
This was O’Toole at his most eye-wateringly dishonest. The first incident, the murder of Patricia Murphy, had occurred twenty-six years earlier. The second, despite O’Toole’s disingenuous term “lives another man” occurred eleven years previously. O’Toole had thus linked the two Murphy murders and one sexual assault as if, roughly speaking, they had occurred recently, rather than divided by over a quarter of a century and eighty miles.
Once it was revealed that poor Aisling had not been killed by an Irishman but by a Roma, the hysterical media-excoriation of Irish males promptly stopped. Aisling’s boyfriend in a victim-impact statement said: “It just sickens me to the core that someone can come to this country, be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare, and free medical care for over 10 years, never hold down a legitimate job and never once contribute to society in any way shape or form …We have to, once and for all, start putting the safety of not only Irish people but everybody in this country who works hard, pays taxes, raises families and overall contributes to society, first.”
Quite disgracefully, The Irish Times refused to print those perfectly reasonable and accurate words, though they were of course condemned on the BBC by the newspaper’s columnist, Kitty Holland. Telling venomous falsehoods about Irishmen is apparently OK. Telling the truth about an evil Roma is not.
The Minister for Justice McEntee next announced a “zero tolerance” policy towards violence against women, even though Ireland was the 11th safest country in the world for women and the safest in the EU, and would have been safer still but for immigrants, who had accounted for 29% of women-murders.
In short, we are cursed with a hysterical Minister for Justice, a cowardly political class and a deranged, feminist-placating media. We used to wonder how a feminist-dominated world look, and now we know: one in which perceptions count more than facts, shrill declarations more that proof and emotions more than logic. Anyone who denies this is a misogynist! Cancel him! Cancel him!! CANCEL HIM!!!
Hold on. Here I am. The mob didn’t quite cancel me, now did it? There is already an answer to this feverish, incontinent drivel. It is spelt G-R-I-P-T. Pray, tell your friends, do.