Danielle O’Connell square in downtown Ennis, Ireland. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A man who claimed on YouTube that the Holocaust was a hoax was sentenced to five months in prison by an Irish court for displaying that view in the middle of Ennis, a town in Ireland.

The defendant, a former taxicab driver, was arrested smashing an ax through his television set at the Daniel O’Connell monument in the center of town, the Irish Times reported on Wednesday.

Irish police said the man was snapping photos of what he called a “conceptual art piece” in the middle of downtown and uploading them immediately to his social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook. Police rushed to arrest him as they watched him smash the TV on closed circuit television monitoring the area.

The man said he put on the “performance art show,” which he called “Liberation of the Mind,” to launch “International Holocaust Hoax Day.”

Judge Patrick Durcan sentenced 49-year-old Dermot Mulqueen to five months in prison for breaching firearm codes and disrupting public order. The judge denounced Mulqueen’s expression of Holocaust denial, saying Mulqueen “may have a view and an interpretation of history, but it is an historical fact that the Holocaust was the greatest crime perpetrated against a section of mankind in the history of mankind,” according to the Irish Times report.

Mulqueen’s attorney reportedly argued his client had no issues with the Jewish community, while Mulqueen noted he became convinced the Holocaust was a “hoax” after watching some videos on YouTube, in August 2013.

YouTube, like Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants, has recently come under fire by Jewish organizations and Israeli groups that claim these platforms have become overrun with unchecked antisemitism, including a recent lawsuit against Facebook for failing to monitor calls to violence.