“The Irish Hate Speech bill is back”, my colleague Ben Scallan wrote yesterday, sparking in the process what I’d describe as healthy internal disagreement in the Gript Newsroom.
To be clear, I think Ben’s interpretation of events is perfectly legitimate: Both Simon Harris and the new leader of the Greens, within moments of their respective elections, indicated their intention to pass the controversial legislation within the dwindling lifetime of the present Dáil, which has at most about eight months left to run.
When politicians say things like that, it’s fair to say, in a sense that the bill is “back”, as in it’s back on the agenda.
That said, it seems to me to be vanishingly unlikely that the hate speech bill will pass, or that the Greens will push hard to pass it in the teeth of what remains substantial backbench opposition in the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael parliamentary parties. Nor, it should be said, do the Greens have any power to bring the bill to cabinet: The Minister for Justice is not of their team, and she takes her orders from Simon Harris, not Roderic O’Gorman. If Fine Gael don’t want the bill back, then there are all sorts of ways for a Minister to delay it.
It does strike me, however, that this is exactly the kind of fight it suits the Green Party to have in the run-in to the next General Election, whether that might be in October or in the new year.
Yesterday, in the Irish Times, John McManus offered this assessment of O’Gorman’s likely leadership style:
It does suggest O’Gorman – who appears to lean into the Green Party’s positions on social justice as much as he does into climate change – may be the right choice for the party. His election pitch made much of his achievements in the areas of childcare, refugees and adoption. Hackett adopted a much more traditional environmental approach.
This, I think, is exactly right: O’Gorman is going to run the Greens, in the upcoming election, as the unapologetic champions of the “woke” agenda: Opposing restrictions on immigration; taking the fight to the “far right”; standing up for transgender rights; aggressively pursuing a war on the role of religion in education; pushing for more media regulation; and aggressively campaigning for hate speech and hate crime laws. Climate Change will be an issue, sure, but only as a way to differentiate the party from Labour and the Social Democrats.
He knows, I think, that about 15% of the electorate are wholly on board with that agenda, and that they tend to split their votes between Labour, the Social Democrats, and his own party. He has recent evidence of how powerful that vote is, as well, as it combined to deliver a commanding win for Labour’s Aodhán O’Riordáin in the Dublin European elections, and did it by means of a very strong transfer between the three parties. He also knows that the Social Democrats are in rough shape and that their leader might not even be on the pitch during the campaign, owing to her pregnancy, and that Green candidates will be very reliant on transfers to get elected.
The hate speech bill, in many ways, is the perfect issue for the Green Party if it is pursuing this strategy. Exciting voters and motivating them to vote is job number one for any political party – and what motivates progressive and left-wing voters more than the idea of criminally prosecuting and silencing their political opponents? As Conan the Barbarian said: “What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women”. For political activists on the left in this golden age of absolute political warfare between competing, largely radicalised by the internet tribes, the Hate Speech bill is a giant promise to afflict pain on those they hate.
This kind of politics-as-vengeance idea is not, of course, confined to the left – you need only go online on an average weekday to find self-identifying “patriots” indulging themselves in fantasies about how this or that Minister or politician will be “in jail” for pursuing their immigration policy or some other issue that’s annoyed the voter on a given day. Donald Trump fired up his base in 2016 with the memorable chant of “lock her up”, while his liberal opponents in 2024 are eager to see the favour returned with interest. Politicians posing – overtly or subtly – as weapons to inflict suffering on your enemies is increasingly a feature of western politics. On the Irish progressive left, there is much hunger for it.
The hate speech bill, in Ireland, is fast becoming a kind of MacGuffin – the item in a film or movie that the goodies and the baddies fight over which has no real significance in and of itself (think “The Ark of the Covenant” in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”). The significance of the bill for both the progressive campaigners fighting for it and the nationalist movement opposing it is increasingly as much symbolic as it is legislative: For progressives, passing it is now about pure power and putting the “far right” in its place. For the disparate factions opposed to the bill, there is certainly a real fear that it would be abused, but there’s also a desperate hunger to demonstrate that the progressive agenda can be stopped, at least on this issue.
The bottom line here, if I am right, is that the Hate Speech bill is likely of more political use to both sides in the general election if it remains distinctly un-passed by the time that election comes. Opponents can rally against the threat of its passage, and the Greens and others can campaign on how essential it is – especially since, sadly, the election campaign is likely to feature at least a few incidents of politicians being abused on the streets or subject to pickets outside their homes. It also gives the Greens an issue on which to criticise Fine Gael in the election and separate itself from its coalition partner – “You blocked the hate speech bill, an act of shameful political cowardice“, etc etc.
None of this, of course, has anything to do with the great many problems that exist in the proposed legislation – none of which, it must be noted, have been addressed at all to date by the Government. As things stand, it is worth remembering, the bill was withdrawn after it became clear that the issues raised by Senators Michael McDowell, Ronan Mullen, and others were likely fatal to its chances of passage. I share the view of Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy that a resurgent Fine Gael – which touched the rarified heights of 24% in the weekend’s opinion poll after a few months of notably toning down the “woke” stuff and sounding tougher on immigration – is unlikely to want to energise the opposition ahead of an election by having this fight again.
For the Greens, by contrast, it’s a different story. That party is not seeking 24-30% of the vote, but 7-10% of the vote. Under Roderic O’Gorman, it will make a twin pitch: We’ll keep on with the climate stuff, and we’ll enforce harsh measures on the “far right”.
It’s not a bad play.