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Comment by GloomyBoots | Hacker News Reader

It bears mentioning that despite the Justice Minister’s unsubstantiated claims to the contrary, polling consistently shows that the vast majority of Irish people are opposed to this. Which in itself isn’t unusual, but the Irish seem more energized around such issues than others at present. will be a place to watch in the near future.

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Do you have a link to such polls?

Quite a lot of the established Irish media has, roughly speaking, been opposed to the law, but there seems broad public support for it.

The most official source is gov.ie’s public consultation results. These have been reviewed by others, with a little under a quarter in support of such measures and a little under three quarters against them, with very few conflicted on the subject. These are the same consultation results cited by Helen McEntee when she claimed it had the support of “the vast majority of people”.

https://www.gov.ie/en/consultation/c3d5e9-hate-speech-public...

And other polls tend to bear out the same result. https://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-freedom-of-speech-3178693-...

Thanks for the link - I hadn't read the gov report and it's a good read. But I can't find any reference in it to surveying support - the questions are qualitative or open-ended to elicit suggestions. The only graphs or percentages in the report at all are showing that just over a quarter of the respondents were based in Ireland.

Your Journal link is not a poll on this legislation - in fact the wording is so loaded I think you must surely be posting it here as some kind of joke?

Maybe we’re looking at different graphs. The one I saw indicated that 79% of respondents were in Ireland, followed by the UK and US (likely Irish citizens living abroad). But no, they didn’t break it down into favorable or unfavorable responses. That’s been done by others looking at the responses.

No need for catty the catty response. It doesn’t matter if it was about this specific legislation. It was about the entire concept behind it. I can find more polls which will show similar results, and I’m sure they all have things you can nitpick. It the fact is that all available data, whatever the quality, supports my position. If there’s such an outpouring of public support, surely that would be worth documenting. Something which supporters of these laws pointedly have avoided doing.

> No need for catty the catty response.

Apologies if I came across as catty, but if you think a TV talkshow hosting an alt-right commentator posing the poll question "Do you support placing limits on free speech to protect people from being offended?" is somehow equivalent to nuanced legislation on incitement to violence, I think that's worth questioning.

What I feel, and what I believe most people who aren’t already bought in feel, is that there is no such nuance. At best, such laws are redundant with existing laws against threats of violence. But in practice, even in places like America that are comparatively lax, that’s just the motte. The bailey is throwing people in jail for things like stickering and flyering because they can be construed as harassing those who disagree with them. Or arresting those speaking non-threatening but “offensive” language because such speech is necessarily going to provoke violence from their opponents (i.e. "inciting a riot").

There are other similarly informal polls from sources which could be classified as slanted. In themselves, they could be dismissed, but there's a backdrop of existing polling in western countries at large, which find the same public coldness toward such laws--and yet they get them anyway. And, again, the public consultation results themselves are available. You're only going to find right-slanted sources for polls because the right know that they have the public support on this. The pointed lack of polling data from those behind the legislation is damning in itself; they measure public opinion on everything. The notion that they just forgot to do it in this case is absurd.

I understand you personally may be opposed to this legislation, but the original claim is that there's broad public opposition to it. Equating your own personal views with those held by the public is all I'm questioning here.

TV & online self-selecting polls on tangentially related topics are not indicative of broad public views on any individual piece of legislation.

> such laws are redundant [...] in practice, even in places like America that are comparatively lax

I will say though that I do find it amazing you acknowledge America (where incitement to violence is a very clear problem) is lax, and also positing that such laws don't work, almost in the same sentence.

I campaigned to end the Blasphemy law in Ireland. This law is hoestly sickening. We all know if will be weaponised to fight culture wars and target political dissent.

I cannot wait until someone asks for the Archbishop of Dublin or the Chief Rabbi or Imam to be arrested under these laws - but they won't be of course. Taken literally it even permits people in possession of a Bible or Koran to be arrested - texts which promote slavery, murder of unbelievers and homosexuals, genital mutilation, praises genocides and the mistreatment of women and so on.

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