On 21 September 2024 it was announced that the Government will now not be introducing laws on hate speech. Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said however that she will press ahead with the part of the intended legislation that deals with hate crime. “I am adamant that hate crime legislation will be enacted,” she said.
The Taoiseach Simon Harris has recently confirmed that it is the intention of the Government to pass the legislation on hate crime before the next general election.
The bill in question is the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022. The current version of the bill is available here, as passed by Dáil Éireann on 26 April 2023. It has been stalled in the Seanad more or less since that time.
The Government’s plan to press ahead with the hate crime part of the bill is incredibly perverse and dangerous, and the public should be so warned.
This is because the hate crime part of the bill seeks to radically change the legal definition of gender in the State, and to do so by the back door.
Irish law currently recognises two genders only. A person, legally speaking, must be either of the male or female gender. This is reflected, for example, in the Equal Status Act 2000 which defines the phrase “gender ground” as “that one is male and the other is female”.
The concept of the use of the pronoun “they” as the identifying pronoun for an individual has no basis in Irish law.
Furthermore, gender and sex are inseparably linked in Irish law. In other words, if a person’s sex is male, that person is of the male gender, and if a person’s sex is female, that person is of the female gender.
Were the hate crime part of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 to be enacted into law, the effect of this would be to erode each of these legal certainties and to create legal confusion in the country in relation to the meaning of the word “gender”.
The passage of the proposed law would mark the first time in Irish history that the State has defined “gender” as indicating anything other than “male or female”.
It would also be the case that, for the first time, legal status would be afforded by the State to the concepts of “expression” or “identification” by a person with a gender which is not the person’s gender.
The passage of the bill would mark Ireland’s abandonment of the Christian standard which has formed a bedrock of civilisation from time immemorial, expressed by the words of Christ in Matthew 19:4: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female?”
The new definition of gender in the proposed hate crime legislation is as follows:
“gender means the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female”.
The Government’s strategy is to press ahead with this radical change by a form of subterfuge, via this obscure definition in the proposed bill, in the hope that the real implications will not be noticed or scrutinised by the general public before it is too late.
It is the duty of all who care about the future of our country to actively oppose this proposed legislation.
As a first port of call, you should ask each of your local TDs/Senators to make his or her position public without delay on this extremely serious matter.
