The Criminal Justice (Hate Offences) Act 2024 was passed by the Oireachtas in October and introduces harsher sentences for crimes where the perpetrator is motivated by hatred of people with protected characteristics.
The law seeks to protect individuals targeted due to their race, colour, nationality, religion, national or ethnic origin (including Travellers), descent, gender, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, or disability.
Gender is defined within the legislation as 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”.
Existing offences covered by the legislation include criminal damage, public order offences, assault, coercion, threatening to kill or injure, and the distribution or public display of threatening or abusive material. These crimes now become hate crimes, with harsher sentences, if hatred towards a protected group can be proven.
If the hatred element is not proven in court, the remaining aspect of the charge can still lead to a conviction.
Additionally, the law provides that if, during the trial of any other offence, evidence of a ‘hate’ element emerges, the judge will treat that as an aggravating factor and record the conviction as a hate crime.
The new law was passed after the Government chose not to proceed with controversial “hate speech” provisions contained in the original Bill.
These excised provisions would have made the “communication” of material deemed capable of inciting “hatred” punishable by up to five years in prison and mere “possession” of such material punishable by up to two years.
However, the 1989 Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act remains in force. This legislation targets speech intended and likely to cause physical violence, requiring the prosecution to demonstrate that the accused intended to incite hatred. What was so chilling about the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, as written, was that it went further on both counts – effectively lowering the criminality threshold from “incitement to violence” to “subjectively offensive”, while at the same time holding defendants liable even if they didn’t intend to stir up hatred.
In practical terms, this could have led to scenarios where individuals claiming to be offended – such as accusations of “homophobia” against a Christian street preacher or “transphobia” against a gender-critical feminist – could trigger investigations. Even if these cases never reached the courts, the investigatory process itself – the knock on the door, the officers of the law pushing past you into your living room, the confiscation of your phone and laptop, the formal interview at the police station – would have had a chilling effect on free speech....<<<Read More>>>...
