The State's advisory body on racism is to report to the Garda a website aimed at taxi drivers for carrying racist and offensive material about immigrants in Ireland. The National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI) believes comments posted on a forum linked from the website www.taxi.ie are in breach of the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act. Dozens of offensive entries targeting black Africans and other ethnic minorities remained on the forum yesterday.
Philip Watt, director, the NCCRI, said it had recently received complaints about the forum and had reported its content to the Internet Service Providers' Association of Ireland (ISPAI).
"They responded by asking for a legal opinion to see if we thought it contravened the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act and . . . we certainly feel it does," he said.
Earlier this year, the NCCRI raised concerns over racist postings on the same forum and its owners published a code of acceptable conduct for its 500 registered users.
Many of those posting recent comments have inserted hyphens and asterisks into offensive phrases to circumvent software aimed at detecting and censoring them.
"It seems to us that they have fallen down from moderating and ensuring that that conduct doesn't take place," Mr Watt said.
"It's something that wouldn't ever be acceptable in its printed form. People would be immediately prosecuted if it ever appeared on a leaflet."
The forum is hosted in the US, which would make it difficult for the authorities here to close it down. However, a link to the forum is provided on the homepage of www.taxi.ie, which describes itself as an independent, not for profit forum for the Irish taxi industry. This site is hosted by an Irish internet service provider which is not a member of the ISPAI and therefore not subject to the code of practice to which most in the sector subscribe.
Mr Watt said he would ask the Garda Racial and Intercultural Officer to investigate the link between the forum and www.taxi.ie.
"It raises issues around the need for all service providers to be part of the association, and maybe that should be a legal requirement," he said.
A ISPAI spokesman said: "It has been reported to us, and we have seen the comments, and some of them are pretty nasty."
"If this was hosted in Ireland by one of our members, it would have been taken down. But our problem is that we have no direct control over this,"he added.
The www.taxi.ie website did not respond to queries from The Irish Timesyesterday.
