Blasphemy laws are a blight on the value of freedom of speech

Sometimes in politics, logic doesn’t poll well. Sometimes doing the sensible thing is just too expensive. To be politically prudent, you ignore the right option, put your head in the sand and hope one day in the future it will all be tidied up for you.

And so we have Ireland’s blasphemy laws courtesy of minister for Justice Dermot Ahern, which came into effect on New Year’s Day.Under the law, blasphemy is now punishable by a fine of €25,000.

It seems strange to enact a “blasphemy law”, a name that smacks of medieval barbarism, into a modern, multi-cultural, pluralistic society. In fact the law itself seems quite strange. The law gives no working definition of “religion” and has other legal faults.

It looks very much like this law is not going to be used to mount a prosecution. On closer inspection it looks like it was never intended to be used. So what is it? Perhaps it’s a law to placate angry religious zealots who have been demanding a succinct blasphemy law to be brought into our legislation for years?

But… the truth is that there has been no demand from the major religious bodies. The majority of religious leaders and religious institutions in this country oppose the law. Others see this law as kowtowing to radical factions within Islam.

The results of blaspheming Islam have been well documented. When the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed as a terrorist it was met with widespread protest across the Muslim world, some turning violent.

So, is it likely that Minister Ahern brought in the law to appease radical Muslims? It seems plausible until you consider that Muslims amount to only 2% of the Irish population. The real reason we’re stuck with this inert, defunct, laughable law? The government needed to pass the second Lisbon referendum.

The Yes campaign, which had been so abysmally coordinated during the first Lisbon referendum, was gaining momentum. By refusing to allow people to vote on removing blasphemy from the constitution at the same time, the government ensured there were no distractions to derail the Yes campaign. The government wanted the electorate’s collective mind to be on passing the Lisbon Treaty – nothing else.

Politics in Ireland is a strange business. What we have now is a law that causes more outrage then it seeks to prevent. A law that holds no legal merit. A law that promotes an ethos to the world that the nation actually opposes. We have a law that should never have been created, that should have been removed by those in power years ago.

Whatever the cost of holding a referendum to remove the need for a blasphemy law from our constitution, I can assure you the cost of keeping this embarrassment on our statute books is far greater.