'It's insane': Donald Trump Jr attacks Irish hate speech bill ahead of his father's visit

Former President Donald Trump is due to visit Ireland this week as he visits his golf courses – and his son prepared for his visit with an attack on the host country's proposed new hate speech law.

"It's insane," he tweeted.

As The Independent points out, Donald Trump Jr. was responding to a Twitter user who wrote: “Ireland is about to pass one of the most radical hate speech bills yet. Merely possessing ‘hateful’ material on your devices is enough to face prison time. Not only that, but the burden of proof is shifted to the accused, who is expected to prove they didn’t intend to use the material to ‘spread hate’. This clause is so radical that even the Trotskyist People Before Profit opposed it as a flagrant violation of civil liberties. Dark times.”

Trump Jr. replied, writing: “It’s insane what’s happening in the ‘free world.'"

Justice minister Helen McEntee, who introduced the legislation last year, said it was designed to protect people who are "living in fear."

“We all have a right to feel safe and to be safe but for somebody to feel unsafe simply because of who they are, so their race, their religion, the colour of their skin, and their sexual orientation, it’s not a society that I want to live in, and it’s not what we should be tolerating," she said.

The legislation is the first of its kind since Ireland does not currently have specific laws dealing with hate crimes.