Varadkar dismisses negative response in Public Consultation to Hate Speech Bill

Varadkar dismisses negative response in Public Consultation to Hate Speech Bill
by u/FreeSpeechIreland in ireland

32 comments

  2. Hmm.

    If there’s a public consultation and you don’t like the answers, it can be dismissed as being hijacked? What’s the point then? Where’s his evidence or indeed the transparency?

    Whether you agree with the proposed legislation or not, if you can dismiss public consultation in this way, you’d have to believe it’s all window dressing in the first place.

  4. All of these “consultations” have turned out the same in every country that had them.

    Those laws are going through, despite an overwhelming negative reaction.

    They’re about to make “hate speech” the moral duty of all citizens.

  7. An absolute shitbag bought paid for and fully owned. People need to revolt and stop accepting this fucking nonsense. If you keep accepting it they’ll keep pushing more and more rules until they’re telling you where you can go who you can associate with and what you spend your money on etc. Enjoy

  8. An awful lot of politics in Ireland is just kabuki theatre. I doubt many in FF/FG really care about this either way, they just know it’s what’s expected.

  10. Our government can’t create longer sentences for violent crimes like rape and murder, or end the joke of ‘concurrent’ sentences, but they *can* enact some completely new, pointless and nonsensical legislation aiming to curb free speech, which no doubt will further clog our courts in time with bunches of spurious cases taken against normal people engaged in wrongthink by the perpetually offended. Priorities in order lads.

  13. “so we can find out what people’s thoughts are”

    A better way to answer that question would have been… so we can find out what people’s thoughts are in relation to the proposed legislation.

    By omitting the last part he hints at the real purpose of the exercise… to identify potential threats to the way the gov want to proceed. That would imply the outcome was never about obtaining the best legislative solution for citizens and state alike, rather it was about obtaining the best outcome for the gov.

  14. “Me and my friends encouraged all our other friends to submit negative comments to the consultation. How dare you ignore our very blatant attempt to skew the results!!”

  17. If the opinions are primarily supportive of the legislation then hurray for the democracy of public consultations, if they are opposed to the legislation well then em the opinions received in these consultations actually suffer from selection bias and arent actually representative of Irish society.

    This man lost any integrity he had when he said he wouldnt vote for gay marriage years ago. Spineless career politician only interested in his self image, elitist friends and position of privilege and power.

  20. If this law passes, the government can pick and choose what constitutes a hate crime. Don’t let them get this power. We may as well resurrect Hitler at this stage like.

  21. “Ireland is a democracy. Decisions are made by the Government and the elected parliament. They’re not made on the foot of public consultations”

    Google translate:

    “Tell us what you think and we’ll tell you to fuck off”

  23. so what do these laws consist of exactly? while I absolutely do not condone hate speech in any way, it’s abhorrent, this seems like an infringement of our right to freedom of speech. I don’t think anyone should face legal action for using hate speech. they should be shunned obviously and told to fuck off but it’s freedom of speech and I feel like this law is going to be abused

  24. I put up a snippet of this new hate speech law and I was called a twat on here. I can’t believe people are ok with any law like this potentially passing. They can and will decide what is hate.

  27. This isn’t good. People need to be more worried about this. 70% and they’re ignoring the majority to do what they want.

    This bill needs to be stopped.

  28. Leo wouldn’t know democratic principles if it concocted a stitch up to keep him in power long past his sellby date.

  29. I know it’s not what he said, but all I could hear there was, “We’re a democracy. And that’s why myself and my cronies get to make the decisions, and the rest of you filthy cretins don’t”

  31. Every public consultation I have ever took part in has gone one of two ways:
    Public body (govt, council etc) wants to do something and they consult public.
    If the public agree with what the govt/council want, it goes ahead.
    If the public disagree with what govt/council want, it goes ahead anyway.
    It’s all just a waste of money.

  32. It’s an insanely dumb law, but Jesus Christ if people could stop deliberately missing the point of consultations, that’d be great.

    We don’t live in a direct democracy and consultations are not referendums. The point of them is to let people flag potential issues and enable the government to modify the legislation if they choose to address those concerns.

    It’s unfortunate that Varadkar wasn’t able to articulate any specific change they made in this case (based on how mental the final legislation is, I’m guessing they didn’t consider public feedback at all). The journo is probably right to be seriously skeptical that the government ever had any intention of listening to consultation feedback, but I don’t like the reasoning that it is undemocratic to ignore a consultation in general.

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