From top: An extract from The Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill; David Langwallner
This is follow-up to my post on the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill and prompted by a Broadsheet contributor, who noted that, as well as the right to offend being criminalised, the authority of the state or undermining the same is now also potentially subject to penal sanction. a further restriction on speech. It is Section 46 J and sneaks in at the end. A sinister afterthought deliberately masked?
Now the question of undermining the authority of the state is a question that feeds into whether and to what extent that authority should be respected.
Frédéric Gros in a recent essay on civil disobedience pointed out the dangers of internalised compliance and one Broadsheet commentator suggested free speech had gone too far to much dismay and rightly so by fellow commentators.
The crucial question is, do the gatekeepers or custodians of the system uphold authority or are they simply authoritarian and despotic? Who judges the judges? Is it a mafiosa state run by nods, shrugs and whispers?
When there is a state of siege and what is called a crisis of legitimation of the state then the suppression of criticism is the undermining of democracy by those who do not believe in democracy in the first place. Is that where we are now?
Should we undermine their authority? Oh, yes.
Our police force should be disbanded. Their authority is a grave question. They have run their training facility in Templemore as a money laundering exercise. They have actively framed people not least for child sex abuse even their own whistle-blower Garda McCabe. They falsified over a million breathalyser tests. They have resorted to high crimes and cover up and paper up their infamy.
So does it undermine the authority of the state to say they are, in terms of higher management and the Heavy Gang and those in Harcourt Street, a quasi psychotic bandit organisation?
The state, in league with multinational corporations and law firms, have created de facto a shadow state where the laws are drafted in favour of vulture and hedge funds dispossessing people and giving freehold entitlements on all new properties on a sale and leaseback arrangement to prevent security of tenure of future Irish generations.
Does that statement undermine the authority of the state?
NAMA, the national association for misery and austerity has been used in a fraudulent way to park or thieve billions.
Does that statement undermine the authority of the state?
The state has designates or agents and those are our political class. Now that intersects with the right to ridicule and offence but if one said that the emperor had no clothes and were paid by their corporate paymasters would that undermine the authority of the state?
If one said that the judiciary had not upheld the constitution properly and certainly in due process terms for the last 20 years, would that scandalise the judiciary?
If one said that state sponsored policy of coerced vaccinations for all including children was a dangerous vista of a culture run by the state and its emanation, would that undermine authority? When authority negates freedom of choice? Of course it would, but authority should only be obeyed when it has authority.
Finally, I said in the last piece that it is not just Sinn Féin who has blood on its hands. The state does as do the establishment families of Dublin. Might saying that help undermine their authority?
Hopefully.
David Langwallner is a barrister, specialising in public law, immigration, housing and criminal defence including miscarriages of justice. He is emeritus director of the Irish Innocence project and was Irish lawyer of the year at the 2015 Irish law awards. Follow David on Twitter @DLangwallner
Previously: Ridicule Is Nothing To be Scared Of
