I was beginning to wonder whether anything can and will be done about the proliferation of racist websites in the ‘new Ireland’.
Quite apart from inflammatory websites such as Stormfront Ireland and The Movement to Save Ireland – both of which uphold a white supremacist view of Irishness and attack anyone, including this writer, who publicly supports immigration and immigrants – we are now told that some Irish taxi drivers, while they are off work, while their time away by jotting their racist thoughts on a forum linked to the website www.taxi.ie.
I looked it up, only to find nasty racist thoughts directed both at passengers of colour and at their fellow drivers. It goes hand in hand with anecdotal evidence that African people find it increasingly difficult to hail a taxi in multicultural Dublin, particularly at night.
To date, complaining about racist websites has proved pointless. The operators of these websites use clever tactics to circumvent their banning. To start with, the sites are often hosted in the US, where the First Amendment secures anyone freedom of speech, regardless of how racist he or she is. Secondly, those posting racist comments often use asterisks and hyphens into offensive phrases so as not to be detected by filter software.
The online racism displayed by some Irish taxi drivers has been brought to light by the NCCRI (I’m glad to note that this State-funded advisory body on racism has its uses after all) which has reported its contents to the Internet Service Providers’ Association of Ireland (ISPAI).
However, the ISPAI told The Irish Times that it could do nothing about the forum which it has no control over, despite finding many of the comments posted on the site ‘pretty nasty’. According to NCCRI director Philip Watt, the forum may contravene the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act (1989). But to date this act has proven utterly toothless and none the Government’s repeated promises to review it have been kept.
Philip Watt noted the difficulty with online racism, which would not be tolerated in printed form. “People would be immediately prosecuted if it ever appeared on a leaflet,” he said. He also told The Irish Times that he would ask the Garda Racial and Intercultural Office to investigate the link between the racist forum and www.taxi.ie.
However, despite its good will and excellent work, the Racial and Intercultural Office has not been granted sufficient powers within An Garda Siochána. Moreover, the ultimate decision of whether to prosecute perpetrators of racism rests with the Director of Public Prosecutions, who would only prosecute if the State is likely to secure a conviction – leaving many racist attacks, particularly in writing and online, unpunished.
The very softening of the definition of racist crimes, re-configuring them as ‘racially motivated incidents’, and the lack of clarity in relation to what constitutes a racist crime, mean that despite the increase in overt racism, very few racists are ever prosecuted. Expressing racist views is seen by some members of the public – and even by some elements of the media – as fair game and as exercising their ‘freedom of speech’. While some people posting on the taxi forum castigated those with racist views, the general tone and freedom to abuse are worrying signs of the time we’re in.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Eireann
