To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the great trick that Sinn Féin regularly pull is to convince people that their previous stance on a given issue didn’t exist. They are the masters of this kind of political chicanery on everything from immigration to building houses.
In fairness, they are not alone. This gaslighting of the electorate is increasingly common as most politicians increasingly seem to have their opinions decided by opinion poll instead of their principles, though there are honourable exceptions, mostly with Independent TDs.
And there’s nothing like an approaching election – or a resounding, crushing, landslide rejection in a referendum – to give TDs pause and cause them to sincerely, genuinely, honestly question if they may be in danger of losing their seats.
Thus we now have Pa Daly, the Sinn Féin TD for Kerry, solemnly swearing that the government’s hate speech bill is “not fit for purpose” and must be scrapped – even though he voted for the same bill in the Dáil just eleven months ago.
Broadcaster Niall Boylan helpfully tweeted the Dáíl record showing Daly, and the rest of Sinn Féin, happily supporting the government in seeking to censor people with difficult opinions last April.
After all those years shouting about Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, it didn’t seem that hard to wholeheartedly support a draconian law that could see people arrested for ‘hate’ despite the failure to define the word, or even arrested and jailed for refusing to give Gardaí a password to a device where ‘hate speech’ might be stored.
You actually couldn’t make this up. Sinn Fein Pa Daly claiming he didn’t support the Hate Speech Bill , yet he voted in favour of it. Sinn Fein are the champions of U-turns to get votes. They really take the public for fools at this stage. Sadly they are not on their own in… pic.twitter.com/hQvyyQ3L9y
— Niall Boylan (@Niall_Boylan) March 26, 2024
Every Sinn Féin TD in the chamber voted to support the bill, with 110 TDs supporting the “draconian” measure in total, while just 14 TDs – mostly Independents, Aontú and PBP – opposed it. No surprise there. Breaking the ranks is not permitted in Sinn Féin, though the rest of the parties aren’t much better.
Yet now Pa Daly, bold as brass, is proclaiming on Sinn Féin’s website a “demand” that the “government must scrap their Hate Speech legislation.”
“It is abundantly clear that this legislation has been badly thought through and is not fit for purpose. It must not proceed,” he says, without a hint of embarrassment.
I have news for you Pa. If you voted en masse in favour of a bill, its as much your legislation as the government. The small number of TDs in the Dáil who did oppose the Bill managed to get a vote called, and every Sinn Féin TD present cast their votes. With a spot you damned yourselves: the record is plain to see.
The real reason for Sinn Fein’s second thoughts on a bill to criminalise speech is, of course, that they can see the way the wind is blowing, as Michael Healy Rae said yesterday.
Daly says that it is clear to him and Sinn Féin that the bill does “not have support across the political spectrum”, when its far more likely that the party doesn’t actually give a damn about cross-party support, but is doing what the other parties are doing: parsing the NoNo vote and watching the polls and worrying that the rush to offer blind commitment to a woke agenda is now harming them in unexpected ways.
As my colleague Ben Scallan posted this morning, Sinn Féin listed ‘enacting robust hate crime legislation’ as one of its “priorities” in its manifesto
Hate crime legislation certainly was at the very least. https://t.co/kiJQf7dsVK pic.twitter.com/pMGN6xNQwz
— Ben Scallan 🇮🇪 (@Ben_Scallan) March 26, 2024
On behalf of the party, in 2018 Senator Fintan Warfield called on the “Minister for Justice and Equality to bring forward robust hate crime legislation as a matter of urgency”.
And while the party is now scrambling to insist it offered amendments to the bill, a close examination by Matt Treacy on this platform previously revealed that at least two of those amendments would have made the bill even worse: by seeking to expand the ‘protected characteristics’ under the bill.
Amendment 12 even suggested that someone might be liable for prosecution on the grounds that they might have made “references to persons seeking international, protection, persons with refugee status, persons with permission to remain and persons with either regular or irregular migrant status.”
(The party also enthusiastically supports locking up mostly elderly people for saying prayers, even silent rosaries, near abortion centres. Senator Paul Gavan, a trade unionist, is particularly keen on smacking down that right to peaceful assembly and protest).
And then there’s the fact that there are only a small number of Sinn Féin Senators where they made a last-minute show of opposing the bill, in contrast to how they happily voted it through in the Dáil were they have a substantial presence, and could have led to it being defeated.
Sinn Féin, like the rest of the political parties, get away with these brazen u-turns because the electorate is largely not paying attention, and is understandably preoccupied with the crippling cost of living, the housing crisis, and the chaotic healthcare system.
They were strangely quiet when Senator Sharon Keogan said she felt the bill was designed in part to “keep political dissenters quiet” – just as there isn’t a peep out of them at the moment on the government’s failure to cap asylum seeker numbers, or the revelations about the terrible experiment that gender affirmation therapy for children has been. They think that if they just stay quiet long enough, and brazen it out, the people will forget their record on these and other issues.
It might not work this time. The No No vote was a kick against the establishment and Sinn Féin have happily been part of that now for the longest time. Their support is slipping, even as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are floundering. People are angry and take umbrage at the notion that they might be locked up for expressing their opinions on the appalling mismanagement of the country.
A small number of actual democrats in the Dáil and Seanad spoke up against the hate speech bill. Civil rights and free speech campaigners – the ones who were not in receipt of government funding – helped to build public awareness. Gript was almost alone in the media platforms asking hard questions about what it entailed.
There’s an old saying about rats and sinking ships that comes to mind when Sinn Féin’s opposition is being promulgated as evidence of sincere and radical oppositon.
Meanwhile, the Community Notes section on X has added a helpful note from readers who “added context they thought people might want to know” about Sinn Féin’s flip flop on hate speech.
Sinn Féin spokesperson on Justice Pa Daly TD has demanded that government scrap their Hate Speech legislation as it is not fit for purposehttps://t.co/eVROOVzODE
— Sinn Féin (@sinnfeinireland) March 25, 2024
That’s on the record. All the bluster in the world won’t change it. The bill isn’t the only thing not fit for purpose.