Sarah Harte: Limiting freedom of speech is a threat to a functioning democracy

Irish Examiner

18 hours ago

The poet and public intellectual Thomas McCarthy told me this week that he thought the Western World was depressed.
One depressing and alarming development is the erosion of freedom of speech. Censorship is proliferating in front of our eyes, and it's reached our shores with real-life consequences for our adult children.
America, no longer the land of the brave and the free, is where Irish J1 students will have their social media posts checked going back five years. There is something surreal about this. Big Brother is watching you but not even bothering to hide it.
Last week, it was reported in the Irish Examiner that visa applicants must 'list all social media usernames or handles of every platform they have used from the last five years on the DS-160 visa application form.' Privacy settings on all social media platforms must be set to public.
Talk about having a chilling effect on freedom of speech among a crop of young people who have just come of voting age. We need their young voices.
I chatted to a retired senior judge about this last weekend, and he was horrified by the development. As he said, bad things like this happen incrementally, until one day you wake up to a knock on the door and think, 'Jesus, how did we get here?'
Workers stand handcuffed after being arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, at Delta Downs Racetrack, Hotel and Casino in Calcasieu Parish, near Vinton, Louisiana last month. Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement via AP
Both the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste have expressed concern. Simon Harris intends to raise the matter with the new US Ambassador next month. Micheál Martin has stated that he disagrees with the measures.
In reality, the American Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) now essentially reject travellers to the United States who are not ideologically in line with the regime. The parameters of what is considered dissent against the regime seem broad and vague.
Imagine if we checked the phones of American tourists in Dublin and said, 'No, sorry, you don't get to see the Cliffs of Moher or the Book of Kells because we see from your social media posts that you deny the genocide in Gaza and you seem supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu'.
What the hell has happened to America with its modern-day version of McCarthyism restraining people who hold opposing views? Are all lessons from the past being lost?
Barack Obama, who has frustrated many Democrats with his relative silence on a range of subjects in the USA, issued a warning a week ago that America is dangerously close to losing its democracy. Except it's not just in America that this censorship is taking place.
Kneecap fans at Glastonbury at the weekend. Following the festival, British police are considering whether to launch criminal investigations into the hip hop group and punk duo Bob Vylan.
Freedom of speech has been under relentless attack in the UK. Their Public Order Act 1986 is capable of broad interpretation. In tandem with two further acts of 2002 and 2022, it effectively allows policing to be politicised with jokes, social media posts, and even private conversations arguably coming within their dragnet.
Following the Glastonbury Festival last weekend, British police are considering whether to launch criminal investigations into two acts: the Irish hip-hop group Kneecap and the punk duo Bob Vylan.
One of the members of Bob Vylan chanted 'Death, death, to the IDF'. The police announced the possibility of an investigation on Saturday on X.
You might not like what someone says, but you may want to ensure that people still have the right to say it. The question is, where does cultural resistance and performance (including satire) end and terrorism or incitement to hatred begin?
This is not an easy question to answer, but it is a vitally important one.
While 'Glasto' was going on, John Brennan, former Director of the CIA, addressed a summer school for the Law Society's Centre for Justice and Law Reform in Dublin. It was on the theme 'Defending Democracy: Legal Responses to Emerging Threats'.
He remarked on the 'delicate balance' faced by governments in permitting free speech while prohibiting hate speech and incitement to violence.
We've had a back-and-forth on this ourselves, with hate speech laws being dropped last year by former minister for justice Helen McEntee due to a lack of consensus on the thorny issue. I have found myself flip-flopping on the subject, but I have come to believe that we should probably be wary of hate speech laws for fear of stifling public discourse.
Kneecap
It is precisely because clamping down on freedom of expression is taken so seriously by human rights lawyers that Kneecap's frontman, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs under the name Mo Chara, has attracted an extraordinarily heavyweight legal team defending him in his alleged terrorism offence.
He was charged last month for allegedly displaying a flag in support of Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah at a concert in November 2024. He has firmly denied the charge but is currently on bail.
Ó hAnnaidh's legal team (Kneecap call them An Scoithfhoireann or the Dream Team) is a roll call of who's who in human rights law, including Gareth Peirce, who formerly represented the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.
Peirce has devoted decades to defending underdogs. Critics see her as destabilising the establishment and undermining national security, which is the catch-all rationale that the Americans are using now to reject visa applications or even detain people.
Peirce has spoken in the past about the dangers of stigmatising people as a threat to national security when they're not, and 'how justice dies when the law is co-opted for political purposes'.
Gareth Peirce avoids the media like the plague, but in an old interview, she said: 'We take it on trust that if the government suspects people of terrorism and locks them up, or puts them on control orders without charge, they must be terrorists.'
When a political context is as febrile as it is now, it is more likely that governments will dismantle fundamental freedoms, and we won't question what is really going on.
Could this crackdown be a reaction or an attempted distraction from the allegation that the British state has failed to uphold international law and arguably been complicit in genocide through its supply of arms to Israel? Either way, the trial promises to be an important test of the principle of freedom of expression.
At Glastonbury, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh accused Israel of genocide and led the crowd in a chant of "free, free Palestine' as well as anti-Starmer chants. The anti-Starmer chants were explained by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's remarks last week when he said that it was 'not appropriate' for Kneecap to appear at Glastonbury.
Michael Eavis and his daughter Emily, who run the famous festival, were said to have been pressurised not to let them play.
At Glastonbury, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh accused Israel of genocide and led the crowd in a chant of 'free, free Palestine' as well as anti-Starmer chants. Photo: Yui Mok/PA
Meanwhile, in Germany, you can't hold a pro-Palestine demonstration without risking arrest and being accused of anti-Semitism. The Irish writer, Naoise Dolan, has spoken about being detained twice in Berlin for attending pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
We're fortunate enough to live in a country where freedom of speech is protected in our Constitution. We received a positive school report from the Democracy Index last year, indicating that we have a fully functioning democracy and are expected to perform well in the 2025 Index.
Let's keep it that way because we need dissenting voices now more than ever.