Fintan O’Toole: Ireland's anti-Traveller hate speech is the respectable group prejudice

First a warning: the beginning of this column contains some highly offensive language. I quote it because otherwise the point could not be made.

In 2011, the State initiated a very rare prosecution for online hate speech under section 2 of the 1989 Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act. The accused, a 27-year-old Kerry man, had created a Facebook page entitled “Promote the use of knacker babies for shark bait”. He suggested on it: “Instead of using animals for shark bait, they could use knack babies. Also as food at feeding time in the zoo. And for testing new drugs for viruses.” A total of 644 people joined this Facebook group, and many of them added further abusive comments.

There is no workable law in Ireland against posting online any material, however sick, that purposefully dehumanises any group of people

The case was heard at Killarney District Court. It was dismissed by Judge James O'Connor on the grounds "there was a reasonable doubt that there had been intent to incite hatred against the Traveller community". As the Law Reform Commission (LRC) later put it, the case showed "the 1989 Act… is ineffective". It is, in fact, worse than ineffective: it provides a shield for online racism. It is a red light that turns to green whenever anyone approaches it.

Two statutory bodies, the LRC and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, have called for new laws to deal effectively with online racist hate speech. Yet, in almost a decade since the legislation was shown to be worse than useless, the State has done essentially nothing. There is no workable law in Ireland against posting online any material, however sick, that purposefully dehumanises any group of people. The Fine Gael-led governments have, since 2011, shown no serious interest in doing anything about this. This is the context in which we must take Leo Varadkar's comments to Pat Kenny on Virgin TV on Friday that "black lives matter, but also black feelings matter too".

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The Taoiseach is right, of course. He spoke eloquently and no doubt sincerely about “rooting out” racism in Ireland. He said: “We don’t see many black or brown judges, or in the Dáil – I’m the only one, I think, at the moment – don’t see many presenters on TV, for example, and that needs to change.” (He might justly have added newspapers, including this one, to the list.)

Wave of revulsion

But here's the problem. We are at a moment when the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has, extraordinarily, created a worldwide wave of revulsion against racism. Ireland wants to be seen to be virtuous. And there is a lot of virtue about the place, in schools, in communities, in sporting organisations, in churches and in civil society. But there are also vices, both at governmental level and in the deep culture of our society.

The governmental record is largely one of indifference. The effects of direct provision on creating and sustaining racism have been ignored. The collapse of hate speech laws has produced no legislative response. Ireland has failed to ratify several relevant international treaties and protocols, including the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families; Protocol No 12 to the European Convention on Human Rights; and the Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime concerning the criminalisation of acts of a racist and xenophobic nature. We sign these things and then ignore them.

The number of deaths among Traveller infants is 14.1 for every 1,000 live births compared to 3.9 among the general population

This is the complacency of goodwill. With some egregious exceptions, most Irish politicians have shown decency and a sense of responsibility in dealing with the very rapid growth of inward migration and ethnic diversity. The far right, though very active, is more electorally marginal than in most European and Anglophone countries. The daily racism experienced by people of colour remains largely invisible to the rest of society. The default Irish assumption – ah sure, it’ll be grand – kicks in very easily.

But it’s not grand. Ireland has a homegrown gateway drug to racism: anti-Traveller hate speech. It is the respectable form of group prejudice. It has a long history and it creates the same vicious circle that fuels racism everywhere: stigma enforcing poverty and exclusion, the effects of poverty and exclusion feeding stigma.

Hatred of Travellers

And if we’re at all serious about “rooting out” racism, we need to ask ourselves: so how are we doing with the hatred of Travellers? If this is the test for how long it will take us to stop racism against black and brown people in Ireland, the results are not encouraging. Traveller lives don’t matter. The number of deaths among Traveller infants is 14.1 for every 1,000 live births compared to 3.9 among the general population. Traveller women live on average 11.5 years less than women in the general population. Traveller men live on average 15 years less. But so what? The national Traveller health advisory committee has not met since 2012. A long-awaited national Traveller health action plan remains unpublished by the HSE.

This isn’t all the fault of government. When the Taoiseach says we must not “repeat the mistakes of countries like Britain and France and the US” in relation to racism, he occludes a fact most Irish people don’t want to face: that we have our very own mistakes and we keep repeating them.