The Minister for Justice, Simon Harris, has dismissed concerns raised by Donald Trump Junior and Elon Musk over proposed new hate crime legislation in Ireland.
Mr Trump has described the measures contained in the bill - that is making its way through the Seanad - as "insane" while Mr Musk branded the legislation as "very concerning".
The bill is the first specific legislation to deal with hate crime in Ireland.
It is designed to make it easier to secure prosecutions for crimes targeting "protected characteristics" such as race or sexual identity. It includes provisions to prosecute people for hate speech or possessing hateful material.
Simon Harris said when someone from the Trump family or Mr Musk took a contrary view it was "not a bad day at the office".
Mr Harris said people portraying the new legislation as an attempt to police thought were seeking to misrepresent the intent of the laws.
"The reality here is there's people trying to overstate things here for whatever reason. That's fine, we live in a democracy and let people have their debate," Mr Harris said.
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"This legislation went to Dáil Eireann. There's not much that the Opposition and the Government agree on, (yet) overwhelmingly the Dáil passed this legislation, because it's not about policing thought, it's not about stopping freedom of expression.
"What it is about though is keeping people safe and making sure that people can go about their lives and not be discriminated against and have a result of that discrimination seeing them often be physically assaulted, or incitement to hatred in relation to them," he added.
Mr Harris said critics need to "take a little step back" and consider what the bill contains.
"Freedom of speech, freedom of expression - these are protected rights. We have a constitution, and we're members of the European Union, we're proud members of the United Nations," he said.
"This is a country where only as recently as this week you saw in the new press freedom survey Ireland go up four places. We're seeing our defamation laws be reformed.
"This is a country that values free speech and indeed I even said myself when speaking at committee stage on this legislation, it's absolutely your right to say offensive things, that's absolutely your right in a democracy, but it's not your right, absolutely not your right, to say something that incites hatred or danger towards another person, absolutely not your right to try and whip up homophobic activity and violence, homophobic violence against people, it's absolutely not your right.
"And when you talk to people who are often subject to such attacks, I think they'll tell you what they see and what they feel when it comes to hate speech," Mr Harris said.
"So there's been an attempt by some, for whatever reason, to go about misrepresenting that. Best wishes to them, it's their right in a democracy to do that.
"But when you see Donald Trump, junior or senior, whatever, a member of the Trump family and Elon Musk opposing your legislation, and when you say Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and the Greens and Sinn Fein, Labour, all these people coming together to vote in favour of something, you know there's no conspiracy here," he said.
Additional reporting by PA
