Does anyone know how it prevents misuse? As "hate" can be construed in such different ways.
Its been carefully scrutinised and amendments submitted by many groups - including the Irish Council for Civil Liberties who support the final draft of the bill.
If you're reading about the context around the bill this blogpost is a bad place to start: the author is pushing a racist agenda & the blog misrepresents its own linked references.
Have you found any good links?
Everything I found online seems to indicate it needs to be better thought out and was pretty negative. Even EuroNews which I didn't think was anything but neutral on most things?
IE, if a comedian makes a religious joke, why do they not face prosecution under this?
The bill went before the house in september 2022 so there's been quite a lot of discussion, submissions and amendments accepted. Public engagement has been high.
On whether Euronews is neutral - I don't know much about it tbh. Wikipedia says it's French and has been accused of having ties to Orbán of all people, which would align with the Trump representation.
> IE, if a comedian makes a religious joke, why do they not face prosecution under this?
The qualifier is direct encouragement of violence toward a group and there's explicit protections listed for "a reasonable and genuine contribution to literary, artistic, political, scientific, religious or academic discourse,"
As an Irish person I find it infuriating that the Irish Council for Civil Liberties would approve of a bill which criminalises even unintentional "hate" speech with up to 5 years imprisonment but fails to even define what "hatred" is. The bill can't even coherently define the protected groups like 'gender' either.
It is all but guaranteed to be misused to target journalists and political dissent. We are likely to see Sinn Fein take power in some capacity soon. With laws like this soon to be on the books I think people have every right to be worried.
As for politicians opposing a bill, this seems... unsurprising. There's generally politicians on all sides of any given bill. It passed relatively easily so they were clearly in a small minority.
Fwiw this bill was widely supported by many opposition parties - so not something that's been forced through by a ruling party majority.
All said your doomsaying around SF coming to power alongside the scare quotes around the word "gender" give me a fairly strong indication that your own political perspectives likely align with the intolerant minority of politicians who opposed this.
[0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/07/dialogue-ire...