Police are treating the anti-Islam mural at Tulleevin Walk as a hate incident, not a hate crime. This softer approach could make the law seem outpaced by AI, but it is better explained by a decision the courts here reached a decade ago.
Newtownabbey was exposed to two pieces of anti-immigration intimidation within a few days of each other. The first was crude “locals only” graffiti on shop shutters at Abbots Cross, misspelt, with an apparent threat to burn residents out; the police are investigating it as a racially motivated hate crime. The second was an anti-Islam mural at Tulleevin Walk, unveiled a few days later and apparently AI-generated: a burning church, armed figures, green flags. The police are treating that one as a hate incident, with enquiries into possible criminal damage. The cruder, more impulsive piece has therefore drawn the heavier response, while the more considered one has seen a lighter reaction, which looks odd. Much of the early reactive commentary read this as proof that the law cannot keep up with what AI can now produce, but this misses the point. Most of what the mural says has already been through a Northern Ireland court.
There is a reason for the difference. The Public Prosecution Service is clear that a hate crime is not an offence in its own right. There must also be an underlying offence; hostility may then aggravate how that offence is recorded, prosecuted or sentenced. The graffiti makes this clear: unauthorised spraying on a shutter is criminal damage, and the wording carries an apparent threat. A wall presents a more difficult situation. If it was painted with permission, and the painting broke no other law, there may be no underlying offence for the hostility to attach to.
The wording elevates the mural above a generic anti-Muslim image. Beneath the burning church, it more or less repeats lines that Pastor James McConnell preached at the Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle, on the Shore Road, in May 2014: that Islam is heathen and satanic, a doctrine spawned in hell, and that a new evil has arisen. The mural names him. “Pastor McConnell was right in 2014,” it says, and aligns him with Churchill in 1899 and Enoch Powell in 1968. The Powell reference is McConnell’s own; in the same sermon, he called Powell a prophet. Therefore, the message contained in the mural is not borrowed from elsewhere. It is a local quotation, fixed to a wall a few miles from the pulpit where it was first heard.
This is also why a prosecution is difficult, as the McConnell case shows. McConnell streamed the sermon online, so the State charged him under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, for a grossly offensive message sent over a public communications network. Not under any hate-crime law. The prosecution conceded from the outset that the lines calling Islam satanic and spawned in hell were protected by Articles 9 and 10 of the Convention, so the case did not proceed on that basis. District Judge McNally said those words were easily capable of being grossly offensive, but he could not convict on them, given the concession. The charge came down to a separate remark that McConnell did not trust Muslims, and in January 2016, he was acquitted: offensive, the judge found, but not grossly offensive. Courts, he said, should be careful not to criminalise speech that is merely offensive, however contemptible.
This does not settle the present case. A mural is not a sermon. A sermon is preached to a congregation that chose to be there. In Newtownabbey, that difference is not abstract: the image sits on a street where residents and passers-by have no choice but to see it. In Newtownabbey, that difference is not abstract: the image sits on a street where residents and passers-by have no choice but to see it. The judgment does not protect the mural. What it does is close off some of the avenues through which the law might reach it. Section 127 is not one of them. As the House of Lords explained in the case McNally relied on, that offence is about misusing the public communications network, not about the words themselves; McConnell could have posted his sermon to every Muslim in Northern Ireland by hand without breaking it. A wall is not a network.
That leaves the Public Order (Northern Ireland) Order 1987. Article 9 makes it an offence to use, or to display in writing, words that are threatening, abusive or insulting, where the intention or likely effect is to stir up hatred or arouse fear. A mural reading “a new evil has arisen” is displayed, plainly enough. But the threshold is high, and this is the route the police already considered against McConnell. They interviewed him under Article 9 and brought no charge. The hate-incident label is therefore not an oddity, nor is it proof of an oversight in the statute book. It is what you would expect from police operating in the shadow of that result.
The law has not changed. What has changed is how easily the message travels. McConnell needed a pulpit and a congregation, and he needed to put the sermon online, which is what took him to court. The mural needs an AI prompt, a way to print or paint it, and a wall to hang it on. From the published images, it does not look hand-painted; it appears to be a generated image printed or otherwise transferred onto a panel. An AI model can produce, in seconds and at little cost, a message that, in that earlier context and on the basis of the prosecution’s concession, the court treated as protected, and make it look like finished public art. The wall then does the one thing a sermon cannot: it fixes the message to a place. Murals here have rarely been mere decoration. They can claim territory and warn people off it. Take away the hours of painting, and that claim becomes simple to repeat, and repeat again.
There is a free-speech objection, and it is a fair one. If McConnell could say these things from the pulpit, the argument goes, painting them on a wall cannot make them a crime, and the worry about the mural is really a wish not to be offended. That is right about the words. It is not so clear about the act. A congregation chooses to turn up. A street does not, and the mural speaks to the residents of that street about who belongs on it. The same words can do different jobs depending on where they are placed and who must walk past them. That is why the 1987 Order reaches words likely to arouse fear, not only words that stir up hatred, and why the police record hate incidents that never become crimes.
So the mural is not really a new problem. It is an old message with much of the labour removed. The wall says what was said in the pulpit, and the courts have already found it hard to prosecute. What is new is that a machine can now turn the message out in minutes, with no skill and little cost. The graffiti at Abbots Cross was the old kind of problem, and the law knew it at a glance. The mural is a more difficult proposition. A court once treated these words as protected when one preacher said them from a single pulpit. Whether that protection holds now that anyone can run them off and fasten them to a wall is the open question, and it will not stay hypothetical for long. There will be more gables like this one.
Sources: The Irish News on the Abbots Cross graffiti and the Tulleevin Walk mural; the Belfast Telegraph report on the mural; the Public Prosecution Service on hate crime; the judgment in DPP v McConnell [2016] NIMag 1, available from the Judiciary NI website; and article 9 of the Public Order (Northern Ireland) Order 1987.
El Cavador is a Slugger reader from Belfast with a particular interest in education
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