I recently asked ChatGPT to rank Irish writers for page, stage and screen by their international cultural impact over the last 30 years. With apologies to Messrs Tóibín, Enright and Doyle, it produced a list that placed Sally Rooney in first place and Graham Linehan in second, explaining that the ranking reflected the importance of television and the fact that both, albeit decades apart, had captured something like a generational zeitgeist.
It is striking that both writers now find themselves at the centre of the debates currently roiling the UK over limits on free speech.
In this newspaper, Rooney more or less dared the Crown Prosecution Service to have her arrested on her next visit to Britain because of her public defence and financial support for Palestine Action, the direct-action group recently proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the Home Office.
Meanwhile, Linehan did not have to wait for the threat: he was detained by armed police at Heathrow airport last week over comments he had made online.
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Rooney and Linehan are not the only Irish artists entangled in such arguments. The prosecution of Kneecap’s Mo Chara for allegedly “encouraging support for terrorism” has been widely covered. The Mary Wallopers were caught up in a furore at a music festival in Portsmouth in August when organisers pulled the plug mid-performance over a Palestinian flag on stage.
A week before that, the Polari Prize for LGBTQ writers was cancelled following controversy over the shortlisting of gender-critical author John Boyne.
Although the two underlying movements here – pro-Palestinian and gender-critical – appear entirely separate, each tends to map, though not perfectly, on to the familiar left–right spectrum. This has produced a strangely bifurcated narrative, with each cause decrying its own censorship while ignoring or disparaging the similar claims of the other.
It is the perfect distillation of “free speech for me but not for thee”.
[ Almost 900 people arrested at London protest for Palestine ActionOpens in new window ]
It may not be a coincidence that Irish artists have become so prominent in both debates. Call it pride or call it insecurity – probably a bit of both – but we often downplay how much Irish artists still gravitate toward London as a metropolitan centre.
Rooney’s rise was propelled by Faber & Faber and burnished by BBC adaptations. Linehan left Dublin – an inhospitable place for innovative TV comedy – for the open arms of Channel 4 and the BBC. Even Kneecap, for all their rebel posturing, benefited from substantial UK National Lottery funding for their film.
Generations of Irish writers and musicians beat a trail across the Irish Sea in search of financial backing unavailable at home. London also offered a safe harbour from a censorious Irish State. More recently, those calculations have shifted. The economic gap has narrowed, even if the UK’s critical mass of publishing houses, broadcasters and film producers still exerts a gravitational pull.
What has changed more is the balance of law. It is hard to imagine hundreds of people being arrested in Ireland for waving placards, as happened in London last weekend, or a writer detained at an airport for a tweet unless it contained a specific threat of harm. Yet this is becoming almost routine in the UK, a country that once prided itself on sheltering dissident voices.
The issues at stake are not abstract and continue to shift. Several years ago, Linehan was given a police caution and suspended from Twitter for writing “trans women are not women”. Earlier this year, the UK supreme court effectively came to the same conclusion in a landmark ruling with far-reaching consequences that reaffirmed biological sex at birth as the determining factor in equality law.
Meanwhile, the proscription of Palestine Action will itself face legal challenge. It would not be surprising if judges eventually find that the ban represents an unacceptable overreach.
The contrast between the two jurisdictions is instructive. The last Irish government’s proposed hate speech law was abandoned under political pressure last year, but some supporters still argue that EU law requires action.
And understandable revulsion at the threats of violence made against Simon Harris’s family often segues smoothly into calls for broader curbs on offensive or obnoxious speech. The UK example shows why such proposals should be treated with considerable scepticism.
Here in Ireland, we should also be mindful that the State is not the only censor. John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty (1859), was as concerned by the subtle coercion of majority opinion as he was by government tyranny. For Mill, the suppression of nonconformity through stigma, exclusion or reputational damage was particularly insidious and difficult to combat.
That lesson resonates today. Last week, Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell apologised for what he described as years of self-censorship on the issue of trans athletes in women’s sport. If someone of Gladwell’s stature admits to being cowed into silence, it is not hard to imagine that thousands of less prominent voices, in Ireland and elsewhere, have done the same.
Here is the truth: free speech everywhere is under pressure. The arrest of Linehan was a disgrace. The proscription of Palestine Action outlaws legitimate protest. Gladwell’s admission highlights the insidious power of social coercion. These are all serious developments, not culture-war pantomime.
The temptation for partisans is to reduce each of these controversies to a morality play of heroes and villains. The reality is more complicated. The principle of free expression deserves more than sloganeering. It requires courts to push back against legislative overreach and individuals as well as institutions to defend the rights of those with whom they may profoundly disagree.
Otherwise, all we are left with is noise – loud, angry, performative – and the quiet erosion of freedoms that ought to matter to everyone.
