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Minister for Justice Helen McEntee is to strengthen the law against hate crimes and hate speech, with the aim of making it easier to secure convictions in the courts. The new measures will be announced later today, with legislation being introduced in the Oireachtas in the autumn.
Minister McEntee has signalled that she is amending her approach to the forthcoming Incitement to Hatred and Hate Crime Bill, with the aim of making it easier to secure convictions. The mechanism is to create new aggravated versions of existing offences, where those offences are motivated by prejudice against what is termed a "protected characteristic" of the victim. These include race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, gender and disability.
Minister McEntee said she hopes the bill will be enacted by the end of the year and that the legislation will cover all forms of media, including online, print and radio.
She said convictions under the new bill would carry tougher sentences. "There are people living in this country at this moment in time who are not living their lives as they should simply because of fear," the minister said. "We all have a right to feel safe and to be safe. For somebody to feel unsafe simply because of who they are - their race, their religion, the color of their skin, their sexual orientation - it's not a society that I want to live in, and it's not what we should be tolerating."
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