Nothing is sacred
Horgan, John
John Horgan NOTHING IS SACRED Blasphemy in Ireland The Irish Supreme Court, in a recent judgment, struck a major blow in defense of freedom of speech and—paradoxically—raised questions about...
...But what do you do if there is no law...
...As far as the Irish Supreme Court judges are concerned, this is plainly a rhetorical question...
...Noting that both the Christian and Jewish religions were mentioned in the 1937 Irish Constitution, they asked: "What then is the position of the Muslim religion, or of polytheistic religions such as Hinduism...
...On that occasion, however, the Anglican church was the established Church of Ireland and enjoyed the full protection of the law...
...The state," it commented, "is not placed in the position of an arbiter of religious truth...
...John Horgan teaches journalism at City University in Dublin...
...The Irish judges, in a sideways swipe at their British counterparts, made a deliberate point about the differences between Irish and British law...
...After all, everyone knew what blasphemy was...
...He is also liable for all the lawyers' costs in the case, which will run to tens of thousands of pounds...
...Commonweal 10 September 24,1999...
...Even this did not go far enough for one conservative bishop, the redoubtable Dr...
...Cornelius Lucey of Cork, who argued in the pages of the Irish Ecclesiastical Record that "antireligious" sentiment should be similarly punished...
...Or did they...
...They did not even need pressure from clerics of all denominations to draft article 40, which laid down that "the publication or utterance of blasphemous matter is an offense which shall be punishable in accordance with law...
...When the court refused him leave to proceed, he appealed to the Supreme Court, which has now thrown out the case...
...The complainant in the current case, a Dublin carpenter named John Corway, had originally sought leave of a lower court to bring blasphemy prosecutions against a daily newspaper, a weekly newspaper, and a music magazine for cartoons and an article—published in association with a 1996 referendum that introduced divorce into Ireland for the first time—which, in his view, were blasphemous...
...But there is now no established church, and the "special position" formerly accorded to the Catholic church in the 1937 Constitution was removed by the people almost thirty years ago in a 1972 referendum, partly as a gesture to the Protestants of Northern Ireland...
...The framers of the Irish constitution, which came into force in 1937, would have been appalled by the question...
...And speech—evidently to the discomfiture of some—is just a little bit freer than it used to be...
...In its judgment, the Court noted that the Constitution, in spite of the fact that it agrees that "the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God," also guarantees freedom of conscience and of expression to those of all religions and of none...
...In that case, the Law Lords—British equivalent of the Irish Supreme Court—held that Whitehouse did not need to prove any specific intention to blaspheme—merely an intention to publish what was held to be blasphemous matter...
...Would the constitutional guarantees of equality before the law and of the free profession of religion be respected, if one citizen's religion enjoyed constitutional protection from insult but another's did not...
...The Supreme Court case in which these issues were raised is the first occasion on which a blasphemy prosecution had been heard in an Irish court since 1855...
...The difficulty is that, because everyone was so sure about the meaning of blasphemy, the Irish Parliament never passed a law defining it...
...In the absence of any law giving practical expression to the constitutional prohibition on blasphemy, the Court ruled, "it is impossible to say of what the offense of blasphemy consists...
...This situation is in marked contrast to the law in the neighboring island where, in 1979, the well-known campaigner for traditional values in media, Mary Whitehouse, won a blasphemy case in the House of Lords...
...No Irish government would now contemplate drafting a law defining blasphemy...
...The prosecution was brought for a case of Bible burning...
...This has belatedly become important in view of the provision in the constitution which says that blasphemy is a crime, but makes it clear that blasphemers shall be punished "in accordance with law...
...He did not get his way, but the constitution, as finally enacted, did not give rise to any problems on this score...
...More recently, case law in Britain was carried even further when British Muslims were told that they could not bring a prosecution for blasphemy against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses because in Britain, where the Anglican church is still the established church, blasphemy applied to Christianity alone...
...John Horgan NOTHING IS SACRED Blasphemy in Ireland The Irish Supreme Court, in a recent judgment, struck a major blow in defense of freedom of speech and—paradoxically—raised questions about whether, in this most religious of countries, anyone can ever be successfully indicted for blasphemy...
Vol. 126 • September 1999 • No. 16
