A threat to free speech comes to Ireland
Dominic Green
Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire primary school is on Parnell Square in north Dublin, near the busy thoroughfare of O’Connell Street. At 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 23, the children were lining up to join the after-school club when a 49-year-old man attacked them and their teachers with a knife. He stabbed two 5-year-olds and a 6-year-old, critically injuring one of the 5-year-olds, and severely wounding Leanne Flynn Keogh, an after-school teacher, as she shielded the children.
As school staff and passersby struggled with the knifeman, a passing Deliveroo driver laid him out with his motorcycle helmet. “I just hit him in the head with all power I have, and he fell down,” said Caio Benicio, who came to Ireland a year ago from Brazil. The police took the attacker to a nearby hospital, where the doctors placed him in an induced coma. He woke up on Dec. 5. By then, Dublin had seen the worst outbreak of rioting in recent Irish history.
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Word of the attack spread in Dublin on the afternoon of Nov. 23. While the superintendent of the Dublin Garda (police) refused to comment on the attacker’s identity but said he was “satisfied that there is no terrorist link” to the attack, the conservative website Gript cited police “sources” whose “working assumption” was that the attacker was “understood to be an Algerian” who had remained in Ireland despite receiving a deportation order.
At dusk, around 500 men, many covering their faces with scarves or balaclavas, gathered on O’Connell Street. In three hours, they smashed the windows of the Holiday Inn and McDonalds, looted the Foot Locker store and a dozen more shops, brawled with the police officers, set fire to three buses and a tram, and destroyed 11 police cars. They firebombed a refugee center, then attacked a fire engine and its crew.
The Garda sent out 400 officers, including the largest deployment of riot police in Ireland’s history. Some 60 officers were injured, three seriously. Twenty-eight men and four women were arrested on charges of weapons and public order offenses and theft of items including cigarettes and clothing. The taoiseach (prime minister), Leo Varadkar, estimated that the cost of the damage to infrastructure would run into “tens of millions of euros.” The head of the Restaurants Association of Ireland put the total cost at 50 million euros.
Justice Minister Helen McEntee blamed “thugs” and “criminals” who wanted to “sow division and to wreak havoc” after the “appalling” attack on the school. Police Commissioner Drew Harris was more specific: Instead of ordinary hooliganism, Harris saw political extremism.
“We have a complete lunatic, hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology,” Harris said later that night. This faction, he claimed, was spreading “innuendo” for “malevolent purposes.” The police’s responsibility to maintain public order included asking people “not to listen to misinformation and rumor that is circulating on social media.”
Harris could not confirm if any of those arrested had a connection with small far-right movements such as the National Party and Ireland First. Certainly, messages on Telegram and other social media channels show that the leaders of the National Party and Ireland First did seek to capitalize on the stabbings. “I want the storm to break loose!” texted Justin Barrett, who considers himself the National Party’s rightful leader despite being removed from the job after a mix-up involving 400,000 euros worth of gold. “All hands on deck. Defend our kids.”
In the two weeks since the riots, the police have issued no evidence of any direct links between far-right groups and the rioters. Garda sources have, however, confirmed that the attacker was indeed of French Algerian origin.
Arrested in 2003, he fought a deportation order for five years, eventually becoming a naturalized Irish citizen. Meanwhile, Ireland’s politicians and media repeat their convictions that the riots were organized “far-right” agitation, and ministers reaffirm their commitment to advancing a “hate speech” bill that threatens to give Ireland some of the most restrictive speech controls in any liberal democracy.
“I think it’s now very obvious to anyone who might have doubted us that our incitement to hatred legislation is just not up to date,” Varadkar said on Nov. 24. “It’s just not up to date for the social media age. And we need that legislation through, and we need it through in a matter of weeks. Because it’s not just the platforms who have a responsibility here, and they do. There’s also the individuals who post messages and images online that stir up hatred and violence. We need to be able to sue laws to go after them individually as well.”
In April, the Dáil, the Irish parliament’s lower house, passed the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offenses) Bill. The government calls the bill a necessary update of Ireland’s 1989 laws against “hate speech” and incitement. The bill is now with the Senate, the upper house, and ministers, citing the need to restore order after the riots, hope it will pass by Christmas.
The bill defines “hatred” as anything likely to offend anyone on account of nine “protected characteristics.” The 1989 legislation outlaws the dissemination of threatening, abusive, or insulting material that may “stir up” hatred of a group on grounds of race, color, nationality, religion, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, and membership of the Traveler community. The new bill adds disability and gender identity and expression to the protected characteristics and makes denying or trivializing genocide an offense. It also defines, for the first time in Irish law, a “hate crime” as a criminal offense that is “perceived by the victim or any other person” to have been motivated by prejudice.
The 1989 law criminalizes only incitement. It is an offense to possess and prepare offensive materials with the intent to distribute them publicly, but it is not illegal to possess them privately or read them aloud in the privacy of your home. If the neighbors hear you reading aloud from your treasured copy of Mein Kampf or your collection of vintage IRA propaganda leaflets, you are within your rights if you can demonstrate that you had no reason to believe they were listening.
The new bill criminalizes all forms of private possession and private communication of material “likely” to incite hatred. A case can be brought if a member of the protected groups “perceives” offense — which is to say, if someone’s feelings are hurt by what they believe to be “hateful” motivations. As in cases involving national security, suspects are presumed guilty “until the contrary is proved.” Refusal to share text messages or passwords can be punished by up to a year in prison. The law covers possession of spicy internet memes and making insulting comments on a public social media forum. It is so loosely worded that it may make a public library liable for loaning books such as the aforementioned Mein Kampf to a reader who is “perceived” as being inspired by its contents.
The Irish Constitution protects the “right of the citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions,” subject to “public order and morality.” The new bill, which is in line with European Union law, puts public order ahead of morality and free expression. In April, Varadkar’s government defeated an opposition motion that would have added the United Nations Convention on Human Rights’s protections of free speech to the new bill. The lobby group Free Speech Ireland, making the most of its liberties while it still has them, warned of “Thought Crime legislation.”
“Massive attack on freedom of speech,” Elon Musk tweeted. “Coming your way, Canadians,” Jordan Peterson warned. “We are restricting freedom, but we’re doing it for the common good,” Sen. Pauline O’Reilly of the Green Party explained in June.
“It’s easily the most illiberal piece of legislation that has ever been proposed in the history of this state,” Gript’s editor John McGuirk told me in early December. “And we’re not renowned for liberal legislation in general. So that says something.”
McGuirk and his site have been widely criticized by Ireland’s politicians, police, and media for inflaming the situation and even raising a riot by reporting the school attacker’s nationality.
“I reject that criticism utterly,” McGuirk said. “First of all, this is a matter of public interest in the most basic sense of that term. Secondly, it provides some partial but crucial insight into potential motivations for the attack. If you look across the continent of Europe, Algerian nationals disproportionately figure to a huge degree in terror attacks of this nature and other criminal incidents. Therefore, in my judgment as a journalist, his nationality was entirely relevant.”
McGuirk added that he was also the first Irish journalist to report that the passerby who probably saved many more children from the attack was also an immigrant. “I find it very difficult to listen to people tell me that the nationality of the Brazilian gentleman who was a hero is relevant and should be published but the nationality of the attacker is not relevant. There’s an inherent contradiction there.”
The school stabbing in November was the third case in two years in which an immigrant committed a crime of almost baffling viciousness. In January 2022, Jozef Puska, a 31-year-old Romani who immigrated from Slovakia in 2015, was convicted of stabbing to death Ashling Murphy, a 22-year-old schoolteacher, as she jogged in daylight along a stretch of Dublin’s Cappincur Canal that is popular with walkers, runners, and cyclists. The murder shocked Irish society. The shock turned to anger when it was reported that Puska, a married father of five who had never had a proper job in Ireland, lived in a state-provided home. But the political and media classes seemed more distressed by the reportage of the victim statement from Murphy’s boyfriend, Ryan Casey.
“It just sickens me to the core,” Casey said, “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 … [and] can commit such a horrendous, evil act of incomprehensible violence on such a beautiful, loving person who, in fact, worked for the state, educating the next generation, and represented everything that is good about Irish society.”
Major Irish media outlets ignored Casey’s statement or reported it only partially. Interviewed by the BBC, Kitty Holland of the Irish Times claimed that referring to Puska’s “race and nationality” was “incitement to hatred,” an example of how the incoming legislation could be used to silence the media. That said, most Irish media are happy to silence themselves. The media, Holland said, were “right to not include” Casey’s full statement because they have “a responsibility to not report views that are an incitement to hatred.” The “far Right” was capitalizing on Casey’s statement, just as it had “latched onto the nationality of the man who attacked the children.” Reporting the facts was “not helpful.”
In July, Yousef Palani, a 23-year-old immigrant of Iraqi-Kurdish background, pleaded guilty to decapitating two gay men and blinding a third in a knife attack in Sligo in April 2022. Palani was brought to Ireland by a U.N. program in 2006, when he was 6 years old. His parents and their eight children lived in a house provided by the Irish state. Neighbors say Palani struggled at school and did not mix well with other children, whether Irish or immigrant, and that they sometimes saw his parents out jogging, his father half-naked regardless of the weather, his mother always wearing a niqab over her face.
The neighbors also say they saw Palani interacting on TikTok with a transgender woman from Thailand. Police say Palani, a regular mosquegoer, identified his victims on an LGBT app and checked whether they were ethnically Irish and lived alone. He then tied them up in their homes, stabbed them to death, and mutilated them. The police also found 357,000 euros, mostly in high denomination 200 euro and 500 euro notes, hidden in two suitcases in the Palani family house. Palani was unemployed at the time of his arrest, and so were his parents. Nonetheless, a “senior Garda source” told the Irish Examiner that the police were “satisfied” that the money was “not criminally linked” and was not received as “terrorist financing.”
“I really would ask people to try and avoid connecting crime and migration. It’s not right,” Varadkar told the Dáil five days after the Algerian immigrant had run amok at the school with a knife. “It’s totally wrong to try and make out that there’s a connection between crime and migration based on what happened on Parnell Street.”
Ireland is like other EU states, only more so than most. Despite currently having the EU’s highest rate of emigration, Ireland’s population rose from 3.5 million in 1990 to 5 million today. In 2009, a quarter of all babies born in Ireland were the children of foreign-born mothers. The government has accommodated the post-2022 influx of Ukrainian refugees in church halls, hotels, and tents originally erected for the Electric Picnic arts festival, and it pays people 800 euros a month to house Ukrainians in their spare rooms.
By 2022, non-Irish citizens accounted for 12% of the population. This is not as high as the United Kingdom’s 14.5%, but the changes have happened faster in Ireland. The result has been a chaotic immigration and asylum system, a housing crisis, sharp rises in serious crime, massive public disquiet — and, it seems, a government determined to suppress unhelpful opinions.
Figures from Ireland’s Central Statistics Office show that the murder rate nearly doubled between June 2022 and June 2023, from 24 cases to 47. The number of theft cases rose by 25%, robbery, extortion, and hijacking by 21%, drug offenses by 19%, and offenses against the justice system by 6%. Gang-related killings have declined, apparently because of the Garda operation that imprisoned major gangsters, but the Women’s Aid organization said there were 12 killings of women, a 50% year-on-year increase. In 2022, according to Garda figures, reports of rape and sexual assault were 13% and 8% higher, respectively, than in 2019. The overall number of reported sex crimes has risen by 75% since 2011. Reports of domestic violence have risen by 40% since 2019. The government does not consider it helpful to collect data on the origins of the perpetrators behind the crime wave. The media are strikingly incurious.
“Ireland is perhaps the most progressive society in the Western world — if not in policy, then certainly in attitudes,” McGuirk said. “It is almost impossible to overstate the entirely uniform views of the Irish mainstream press.”
Ireland’s small media and political classes have fused with a booming NGO sector that in 2021 absorbed 8% of the national budget. There are more than 33,000 nongovernmental organizations in Ireland — that is one for every 150 people — and they are, McGuirk said, “all uniformly progressive.” In the 20th century, the Irish shook off British colonialism and a coercive clergy. In the 21st century, they are drifting into the soft tyranny of the EU and a clerisy of unelected moralists.
The Irish Senate can make amendments to the “hate speech” bill, but it cannot annul it. “If the government chooses to force this bill through,” McGuirk said, “it will do so, and nobody will be able to stop it.”
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Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.