Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022: Report and Final Stages
Dail Éireann — 2023-04-26
============================================================

Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

It gets to the fundamental issue again. We are just going around in circles. This is material that is likely to incite violence or hatred, but the material can simply be sitting on a person's computer and no hatred has been incited. The Minister of State is saying the Garda will intervene before it is done, but the onus is then placed on the individual to prove that he or she was not intending to distribute the material and therefore actually to incite hatred. This is a serious enough infringement of civil liberties and the right of people to have wrong, bad ideas and their own private thoughts and to write them down and have them on a computer and for that not to be an offence in and of itself.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-04-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-04-26