Sir, – Your editorial on the abandoned hate speech legislation asks “why a lengthy process of consultation, drafting and parliamentary scrutiny failed . . . to reveal the lack of consensus” on the Bill (“The Irish Times view on the hate crime Bill: a salutary lesson”, September 25th). The simple answer is that the results of the consultation process were ignored and then quietly buried, and that no parliamentary scrutiny of any meaningful kind took place. During the public consultation in 2020, 3,597 submissions were received from individuals, of which 2,627 (73 per cent) were opposed to the Bill. The Minister for Justice chose to ignore the individual submissions and focus on the fact that a majority of submissions from “civil society organisations” (government-speak for NGOs) had supported the proposals. In the Oireachtas itself, the Bill was discussed for just 90 minutes by the nine-member Justice Committee. Incredibly, none of the Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael members of the committee uttered a single word during the debate.
This Bill was a fiasco from start to finish, and its demise will be mourned by nobody other than the taxpayer-funded NGOs who lobbied long and hard for it. Its only positive contribution has been to expose the abject political incompetence which appears to exist within the Department of Justice, and the seriously flawed process of law-making within the Houses of the Oireachtas. – Yours, etc,
BARRY WALSH,
Dublin 3.