Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 - Read OP

It suggests there are a lot of dick heads with serious disruptive agendas. As I have said before most of those 8000 complaints are from opponents of the legislation who want to bring it into disrepute. Not big and not clever.

The system must be developed to deal with vexatious complaints. The law is just the foundation on which the administrative system is built. The lesson to learn is to anticipate dick heads trying to crash the system and have a way of dealing with them otherwise those dick heads win - which was their intention all along.

We cannot be governed by a rowdy mob of foot stampers.

I want to see consequences for people who threaten violence to minorities and induce others into acts of violence against others. This what the legislation is all about. Your examples are an attempt to minimise the seriousness of hate speech by using absurd examples.

I don't accept your characterization of the bills function so we are going to have to agree to disagree on that.

I won't take your word for it thanks.

Hate speech can apply to anyone - but protected categories of minorities is based on those groups who are most subjected to hate speech. This is based upon analysis of actual crimes. If Irish people were disproportionately subjected to hate speech in Ireland they would warrant been a prescribed category - but hopefully you understand why this is not the case.

The legislation allows for people to feign sincerity with their complaints of hatred which, at the very least, will be noted as non-crime hate incidents. It encourages people to report on the basis of how they "perceive" hatred against them.

It's not "the same as any other complaint"; it is a subjective complaint and it wastes police time, as the experiment in Scotland has already demonstrated. The head of Scotland's police has already confirmed this. I will take his word on the matter, if you don't mind. Or is it your position that he's lying?

Do you think 8,000 complaints a week in Scotland is okay? How many do you think are done by bad actors?

I would say quite a lot, on both extremes.

Doesn't that suggest the very weakness of the legislation, that it opens up the opportunity for people to take advantage of it in such an egregious manner?

So the issue isn't the degree of "prosecutions", how you have erroneously tried to frame it.

The issue is wasting police time, feigned sincerity, and people trying to settle scores or personal vendettas through this legislation.

Put simply, this legislation will be manipulated by bad actors who take personal offense at opinions they don't like. Not actual hatred (undefined), but personal opinions that oppose their own ideological worldview.

That's the real reason they support the legislation, not how they try to sell the legislation to the public through disingenuous sleight-of-hand.

That's the insidious intent behind much of the core support base for this legislation.