Irish Examiner View: Tougher laws on hate speech

Socially-distanced protesters take a knee outside the US Embassy in London, as part of an anti-racism demonstration coinciding with the start of the trial of the four police officers charged with the murder of George Floyd in the US.

The Black Lives Matter protests are an entirely justifiable response to the institutionalised, institutionally protected, and endorsed racism that has bedevilled America since that country's inception. 

That dysfunction, no matter how ugly, does not justify the destruction and violence that some of those protests have led to.  Indeed, the violence and looting undermine the BLM cause more profoundly than anything its opponents can muster.