The Irish parliament passed hate crime legislation on Wednesday evening, which includes within it a redefinition of gender based on transgender ideology.
Ireland’s Criminal Justice Bill passed the Dáil Éireann legislature in Dublin on Tuesday by 78 votes to 52, meaning it can now be signed into law, public broadcaster RTE reports.
The bill will mean that for the first time in Irish history, there will be increased prison sentences for crimes which were found to have involved an element of hatred.
Under the law, a hate crime element is defined as having been motivated by so-called “protected characteristics” such as race, colour, nationality, religion, national or ethnic origin, descent, gender, sexual characteristics, sexual orientation, or disability.
The champion of the legislation, Justice Minister Helen McEntee, said, “We are determined to stamp out hate-motivated crimes and we are determined to protect vulnerable communities,” adding: “It is not acceptable that some people live in fear simply because of who they are.”
Others were less enthusiastic about the bill’s passage, including Freedom Party leader Hermann Kelly, who said it was an “unconstitutional move away from equality of all citizens before the law.”
The legislation was significantly watered down last month, with a vast swath of provisions removed from the bill criminalising so-called hate speech, which even included prison time for merely “possessing material likely to incite violence or hatred”.
Justice Minister McEntee said that she decided to press on with the hate crime legislation without the hate speech provisions because there was not a “consensus” among lawmakers.
However, upon the passage of the bill on Tuesday, the neo-liberal Fine Gael politician said that she “absolutely believes” that the fight to implement hate speech restrictions will continue in Dublin.
The legislation passed on Monday may provide some framework for doing so. The law lays out a gender definition based on the transgender ideological notion of self-identification.
The bill defined gender as: “The gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female.”
Irish schoolteacher Enoch Burke, who has spent hundreds of days in prison for refusing to abide by a court order barring him from attending his school after he was dismissed for refusing to use a student’s “preferred pronouns”, described the new definition of gender as “anti-Christian” and warned that “the youth of our country will be the victims of this harmful ideology if it passes into law.”
“The Minister for Justice has repeatedly lied to the public about the true implications of this bill,” Burke added.