Hate crimes ‘must be coded in law’

Rights groups have renewed calls for hate crime legislation after only 47 incidents were recorded in the first half of the year.

Officially, the number of racist, homophobic, and anti-semitic cases to the end of June is slightly below the last two years, which saw 111 reports for the whole of 2013 and 118 in 2012.

Campaigners claim that Ireland is the only western democracy not to specifically classify hate crime, leaving a massive gap between the records and the reality for minority groups.