Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
In several of my posts over the last couple of years, I've alluded to a piece of legislation making its way through government in Ireland. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 was an extremely sweeping and draconian piece of legislation which would make it a criminal offense to be in possession of a piece of media deemed to be offensive to a group defined by a protected characteristic, and would enable police officers to request search warrants for all of your electronic devices if they believed you were in possession of such a document. In theory, this meant that if your boomer uncle sent an edgy meme to the family group chat, everyone in the group chat could be guilty of a criminal offense, and would be forced to disclose the PINs and passwords for all of their electronic devices to the police. This bill was poised to turn Ireland into the UK, in which hundreds of people are jailed every year for sharing edgy memes or making tasteless jokes on Facebook. The bill passed in the Dáil (the lower house) in April of last year despite a mere 40% of the public being in favour and public criticism from no less than Elon Musk, but has stalled in the Seanad (upper house) since June of last year, well over a year ago.
What a delight the other day to find out that the bill has been officially shelved, although in an effort to save face our Minister of Justice promises that she'll still be pushing for hate crime legislation (so if a crime is determined to have been motivated by prejudice on the basis of protected characteristics, that will be considered an aggravating factor). I always wondered why the bill had stalled for so long in the Seanad: perhaps senators were unwilling to rubber-stamp it but also fearful of what might happen if they officially vetoed it. I suspect the recent shelving is part of the government's last-ditch effort to course-correct before the general election: after this year's earlier embarrassment of a referendum on International Women's Day which was rejected in a landslide, the Fine Gael-led government must now be acutely aware that this woke shit will not fly with the median voter (possibly not even with wealthy urban Irish voters either). Perhaps another possible sign of wokeness in retreat?
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