Under Harris’ Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences Bill (an expansion and “updating” of a 1989 law), which given the supine, protective, and collaborationist nature of the Irish media flew under the public radar until recently), there are now ten classes of “protected” species — all of them liberal darlings of course, including race, color, nationality, religion, national or ethnic origin, descent, gender, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, disability, membership in the “Traveler community” (formerly known as “tinkers”) and immigration status. In other words, just about every observable characteristic of a human being. It’s a list Orwell would be proud of, but it gets worse …

It’s bad enough that the Irish who stayed home betrayed the heroes of 1916 by handing over their hard-won independence less than a century later. But to pre-emptively outlaw opposition to modish political policy in the guise of “combatting hate” and “preventing violence” is fundamentally evil. There are, rightfully, laws against incitement to physical harm and property destruction,” but they must be specific and not imaginary. On the rother hand, there is no such thing as hate speech. There is only free speech, no matter how offensive — and particularly if it’s extremely offensive — or there is not. And it’s our job to defend it, not hide under the bed[.]

[Well put, and Michael has a lot more at the link, too. He goes into more detail than Ben Scallan and I were able to do in our podcast on the topic. Thankfully, Gript has been on top of this issue, and hopefully it will prompt some sort of political pushback before this gets foisted on the Irish people. — Ed]