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A VIRAL VIDEO opposing hate speech laws that has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times mis-cites the results of a poll on Irish people’s support for the EU.
The video also makes other misleading claims about the European Union, such as falsely claiming that the European Union’s laws are dictated by unelected officials, as well as misreporting a German legal case.
The video was posted by an online commentator who calls himself Michael McCarthy and regularly posts misleading content, often targeting migrants.
In this particular video, McCarthy criticises in very strong terms EU Commission correspondence which has said that Ireland is required to legislate for laws to combat racism and xenophobia.
It was posted to McCarthy’s X account on 8 May, where it has been seen 53,000 times to date.
A duplicate of the video was also posted two days later to the Facebook account of former political candidate Ben Gilroy, and has been viewed more than 274,000 times to date, according to statistics on those sites.
While criticising the EU, McCarthy says: “A poll came out today, and RTÉ released it. And it said 53% of people in Ireland are dissatisfied with the EU’s direction. So the majority of people don’t agree with the EU.”
That claim is also wrong. As McCarthy speaks, the RTÉ article he references appears on screen in the video. It can be read in full here.
The poll actually found that “26% are dissatisfied with [the EU’s] direction” — less than half what McCarthy claimed. The same poll also found that support for Ireland’s membership of the EU stood at 82%.
The video makes other inaccurate claims disparaging the EU.
“The EU are now trying to police Ireland’s speech,” the video begins. “People in Brussels, who nobody elected, are dictating what we should and shouldn’t be allowed to say in our country.”
Claims that ‘unelected’ officials pass laws in the EU are false. EU legislation must be proposed by the European Commission and then debated and adopted by the directly elected European Parliament and the Council, made of elected national leaders.
The EU Parliament is made up of 720 Members of Parliament who are directly elected by EU citizens in their own countries.
The EU Council is made up of heads of government, elected by their nations’ citizens. Often, as in the case of Ireland’s representative Micheál Martin, the head of government is indirectly elected.
In other cases, such as France’s President Emmanuel Macron, they are directly elected.
The correspondence Ireland received was from the European Commission, which is made up of commissioners, one from each state. These can rightly be said to be unelected, however they are unable to “dictate” anything, let alone what Irish people are allowed to say.
Under existing EU rules on combating racism and xenophobia, the European Commission believes Ireland is allegedly ”failing” to comply with laws, first agreed to in 2008, surrounding the criminalisation of race-based violence and hatred.
The state has also been told that it must implement legislation against the denial, condoning of and gross trivialisation of international crimes and the Holocaust. The Commission has threatened legal action if the necessary measures are not implemented.
Ireland’s hate crime legislation came into effect at the end of December last year. However, due to a lack of consensus within government at the time, it controversially omitted references to hate speech, defined as public incitements to violence of hatred against a group or member of a group based on certain characteristics.
However, the Commission has not dictated or even enforced rules on hate speech.
Instead, it is monitoring the enforcement of already-agreed laws, in particular a decision passed by the EU Council. And while it may refer the case to the European Court of Justice, that court might not decide to punish Ireland.
McCarthy’s video goes on to say: “They want us to have the same hate speech laws as they have in Germany, where young girls are getting arrested for saying how horrible migrants are for gang-raping a child. That’s a real case!”.
There is a similar case, though McCarthy is describing it inaccurately, and it is not clear it has anything to do with hate speech laws.
The case involved a 20-year-old woman (not a young girl), who had sent threats to a man she did not know who was charged for taking part in a gang-rape.
The woman was sentenced to 48 hours of detention during her leisure time at a youth correctional facility. Such sentences do not carry a criminal record.
There is no obvious connection to “hate speech laws” in this case. The legal term for such crimes in German, Volksverhetzung, does not appear in the German articles about the case.
Instead, the terms Bedrohung and Beleidigung are used—specific legal terms for threatening and insulting someone.
Under the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act 2020, it is already illegal in Ireland to send “threatening or grossly offensive communication”.
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