This tyrannical and unjust piece of legislation poises to turn Ireland from a liberal and democratic society with free discourse and open debate into an authoritarian state where debate and discussion are wholly dictated by the Irish State, where only "acceptable" discussion and debate are allowed.

Under this legislation, a judge may issue a search warrant [section 15] for "any place" and "any persons found at that place" on the basis of "suspecting evidence" of an offence under sections 7,8 and 10. The Gardaí conducting the search may also "examine and seize and retain anything found at that place or anything found in possession of a person present" at this 'place' and must be given "any password necessary to operate it and any encryption key or code necessary to unencrypt the information accessible by the computer".

Section 7 and 10 state that it is an offence to "communicate to the public or a section of the public - in a manner likely to incite hatred or violence - on account of protected characteristics" [section 7] or to prepare or posses "material likely to incite hatred or violence - on account of protected characteristics" [section 10]. The main defence listed for having violated these two sections is that this 'hate speech' could be "a reasonable and genuine contribution to literary, artistic, political, scientific, religious or academic discourse" [section 10 (2)(a) and section 7 (3)(a)] but not public debate or personal opinion. The punishment for "inciting hatred" is to be a fine and/or up to six to twelve months imprisonment. The punishment for "inciting violence" is to be a fine and/or up to two years imprisonment. Are these actions of thought and speech worthy of these severe punishments?

It will also be an offence for a company to have allowed an employee to commit a "relevant offence" [section 13 (1)]. The leading defence for such a crime is for the company in question to have proven "that it took all reasonable steps and exercised all due diligence to avoid the commission of the offence" [section 13 (2)]. Will this cause companies to introduce active censorship policies for communication between employees?

In a vain attempt to distract from the true purpose of this legislation, the bill has a section on the "Protection of expression" [section 11] which states free speech and free expression will be allowed only if "it is not taken to incite violence or hatred" and if it is material or behaviour that involves or includes discussion or criticism "of matters relating to a protected characteristic" but any such speech or expression directly criticising a protected characteristic will be forbidden.

Will you allow Ireland to go down this slippery path to totalitarianism?