Who asked for Ireland’s New Blasphemy Law?

Padraig Reidy, The Guardian UK, July 9, 2009

New rules which forbid causing ‘outrage’ among religious people have baffled Ireland. We were getting along just fine without them

I’m not sure which piece of unpopular Irish news is being buried by which: the announcement of a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty, or the shuffling through of a law creating penalties for blasphemy, an offence that has never properly existed in the Irish state.

While there is certainly a store of resentment in the population at being asked to vote again (that is: vote properly, you morons, as the government is barely holding back from saying) on the Lisbon treaty, there is a certain sense of bafflement at the new blasphemy legislation, smuggled in under the guise of defamation law reform. Nobody wanted this law: no one can think of a single thundering priest, austere vicar, irate rabbi or miffed mullah ever calling for tougher penalties for blasphemy. Certainly there were the frequent, and frequently ignored missives from Armagh, warning the Irish not to abandon God for 4×4s and Nintendo Wiis. And there was widespread dismay when popular comic Tommy Tiernan pushed the Bible-baiting a bit too far on the Late Late Show. But never did anyone suggest we needed tough blasphemy laws. Until the justice minister, Dermot Ahern, decided we needed to fill the “void” left by our lack of one.

Technically, Ahern is correct that Bunreacht na hÉireann requires that blasphemy be a criminal offence. However, no one ever bothered to formulate what the exact offence might be, and we muddled on for quite a long time without anyone worrying about this (perhaps, as a friend pointed out to me, because all blasphemous material was grabbed by the all-powerful censors long before it could ever get to court). In 1999, there was an attempt to prosecute a newspaper for a cartoon mocking the church, but the judge in that case noted that he could not prosecute, because there was no definition of what legally constituted blasphemy. Well now there is. And it concerns itself with what might or might not cause “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion” (note, not just Christianity, as was the case with English blasphemy law: this is, at least, equal opportunities idiocy).

As Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland has pointed out:

The proposed law does not protect religious belief; it incentivises outrage and it criminalises free speech. Under this proposed law, if a person expresses one belief about gods, and other people think that this insults a different belief about gods, then these people can become outraged, and this outrage can make it illegal for the first person to express his or her beliefs.

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