The Irish government is prosecuting a man for his signs.

His name is Hugh Fagan. He lives in Wexford, a lovely little tourist town in the south-east of Ireland — cobbled streets, coffee shops, a medieval abbey. Most days he walks down to the town square, four blocks from his house, and sits on a bench with seven handmade signs propped up around him.

He wears headphones. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t hand out leaflets or ask anyone for anything. He isn’t a member of any party. If you want to talk to him, he takes the headphones off and talks to you — and he told me that happens every day. If you don’t, he just sits there.

And for that, a summons came in the post. He’s charged with a public order offence. When I asked him which of the seven signs he was being charged over, he said the police hadn’t told him, that he’d find out in court.

I sat with Hugh in the square this spring, when I was in Ireland for Kirk Loco’s case, and talked to him for 20 minutes.

(It was filmed in May, so when Hugh says his hearing is “next week,” that was an earlier appearance. His trial is now set for Tuesday, October 27.)

Let me tell you how he started.

In May of last year, he was walking past a church near the Tesco on a Sunday. A funeral was coming out, the casket was being put into the hearse, and a beggar was lying across the entrance. Hugh said to himself, enough is enough, and the next week he was in the square with two signs; now, there are seven.

They’re about mass immigration, about churches being burned down across Europe, about the safety of women and children, about the European Union.

I’ll be honest with you: the signs are blunt. I read one of them out loud on camera, and I don’t agree with every word. Where I disagree, it’s with the style more than the substance — I’m worried about mass immigration too, and about what’s happening to women in Ireland. But even if I disagreed with all of it, that’s the point of freedom of speech. It’s the gift you give your opponents if you want it for yourself.

Here’s what gets me.

The Guards — that’s what the Irish call their police — get called on Hugh almost every week. People walk up to him and scream “racist” and “fascist” in his face. The buskers have told him to move. Pro-Palestine activists have told him “nobody wants you here.” Tourists have stood over him waiting for the Guards to come and arrest him. The local paper has written about him twice.

None of those people have been charged with anything. The only person charged is the man sitting quietly on the bench.

Go Ad Free

Hugh said something to me that stuck. “We’re living in the upside down at the moment,” he said. “What’s true is not true anymore.”

By the way, Hugh told me he’s lived in four countries and never so much as had a parking ticket. He’s not a troublemaker. He’s an unusual man with an unusual way of making his point — I called him the Unreasonable Man, after Bernard Shaw’s line that all progress depends on the unreasonable man, and he liked that.

It reminded me of my friend Chris Elston back in Canada — better known as Billboard Chris — who stands on street corners with a sandwich board. Eccentric, maybe. Criminal? Come on.

This is the pattern in Ireland now, and the more I look at it the more worried I get. Kirk Loco was charged under an anti-terror law for a tweet — for reposting a warning that a migrant had exposed himself to a teenaged girl on a bus. The migrant wasn’t charged; Kirk was. His next hearing is in Bray on October 23, four days before Hugh’s. And now a man with cardboard signs.

The Taoiseach, Ireland's prime minister, goes abroad and calls the country a bastion of free speech. The Irish media cheer the prosecutions on. Nobody in Ireland is pushing back in an organized way.

So we are.

An old friend of mine used to say it’s easier to fight in the first ditch than in the last ditch. Hugh Fagan is the first ditch. If the state can shut up a quiet man with signs in a tourist town, it can shut up anyone. He’s the tripwire. If they get him, they move on to the next one, and the next.

We’ve hired him a proper legal team: Laoise de Brún, a Dublin barrister, and Padraig Langsch, a solicitor. They’re the same lawyers defending Kirk. Their fee for Hugh’s case is 10,000 euros, all in. We’ve already paid half, through the Irish free speech crowdfund you’ve been supporting. The rest is due after the hearing.

And I’ll be in Wexford District Court on October 27, in person, live-tweeting from inside and filming outside. I’ll be in Bray for Kirk four days earlier. One trip, two trials, and you’ll get a report from both courtrooms.

Hugh doesn’t have a media company behind him. He doesn’t have a party. He has a bench and some signs, and now he has us. You don’t have to agree with what he says to agree that he has the right to say it — and if the police are prosecuting him, he has the right to a good lawyer. If you can help pay for that lawyer, please go to IrishFreeSpeech.com.