Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I was about to say that I do accept there is a certain legitimacy to what the Minister of State said in regard to other countries invoking Ireland's law. However, the logical and sensible thing to do is not to endorse their point of view by pretending that our law was ever the same as theirs, but to take every opportunity in diplomatic fora to condemn them for making such bogus comparisons.It is an intellectual and political weakness that fails to see that distinction.

The abolition of the offence of blasphemy has been packaged by the Government as if it is some great advance for human freedom, correcting a serious injustice. The Minister of State, Deputy Stanton, introduced the Bill in the Seanad and seemed to suggest that the existing blasphemy law had made Ireland an international pariah. I do not believe that. It ignored the fact that there has not been a prosecution for blasphemy in this country since we gained our independence, the most recent prosecution having been in 1855 when we were still part of the United Kingdom.

The provision on blasphemy was rendered a dead letter in 1999 in the Supreme Court decision of Corway v. Independent Newspapers in 1999 when a private prosecution, referred to by the Minister of State, was thrown out. A 2017 report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom found that our laws on blasphemy were among the least restrictive in the developed world.

Sections 36 and 37 of the Defamation Act 2009, which the Bill proposes to repeal, were deliberately drafted to effectively ensure that no prosecution could ever be brought. The then Minister for Justice and Law Reform, Mr. Dermot Ahern, openly admitted that this was its aim. This did not stop many Senators, particularly in the Labour Party, from making outlandish claims that those sections would open the door to a slew of prosecutions. I doubt that any of those Senators, if they are still with us - I know one of them is - will now acknowledge that they were entirely wrong.

In summary, the laws on blasphemy, as they existed, have never impinged, even in the slightest way, on any Irish person. In spite of this, we have spent millions of euro and wasted much Oireachtas time in an effort to abolish them. We should think about what is going on in our country when those are the kind of political priorities we have.

The Bill before us proposes to repeal two sections of the Defamation Act. I had understood that a statutory review of that Act was under way. Such a review was announced in December 2016 and I am not aware of any conclusion having been brought to that process, although I may be wrong in that regard. Perhaps the Minister of State will clarify that point. Could the Government not have waited until the conclusion of that process and removed sections 36 and 37 at that stage? With no prosecutions in 150 years, was it really so urgent to proceed with the amendment now?

There are other aspects of the Defamation Act which need to be amended. I am aware that a lacuna was exposed in section 23 of the Act in two recent cases of the Court of Appeal, White v.Sunday Newspapers Limited and Higgins v.Irish Aviation Authority, both of which were heard in 2016. Those judgments require that damages in cases where an offer of amends had been made be assessed by a jury and not by a judge, causing additional cost and clogging up the jury list in clear contravention of the intention of the Act. The Government has not addressed that issue, yet it is now rushing through this amendment to the Act on an entirely separate matter.

Last year, I stated that I saw no reason we should not have purely symbolic words in our law which recognise religious practice and expression but which pose absolutely no threat to pluralism and free speech. We could have left the general provision against blasphemy in our Constitution. I say that somewhat in the spirit of what Senator McDowell was saying. While not in any way wishing to put words in the Senator's mouth, he was clearly saying that we need to protect a civility in our discourse in society and that there is a value in having some nod in the direction of the undesirability of blasphemous commentary, but with due regard to the almost always overriding imperative of protecting free speech. This issue has nothing to do it with free speech. We have no problem with legislation that prohibits certain other statements being made outside of religious contexts. In the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989, for example, we clearly acknowledged that speech is not to be unlimited. Perhaps the Minister of State can explain the reason we can support that legislation while, at the same time, rushing this irrelevant legislation.

In 2013, the Convention on the Constitution proposed that the proscription of blasphemy should be replaced with a new general provision which would ban incitement to religious hatred, whereby all religious denominations should be given equal protection.Not surprisingly, the Government ignored that suggestion. Religious freedom is considered a fundamental right protected in international human rights law across the world. There is rarely any discussion of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in these Houses because the mere acknowledgement of any right to religious freedom in this time and place and in this cultural establishment would be a no-no and would run contrary to a certain national self-image that is being promoted, namely, that Ireland is now a new, liberal, tolerant, post-religious society. Whatever about a desirable secularism and a healthy separateness between the business of the churches and the State, which we would all support, there is a difference between being a modern, secular, tolerant, pluralist society and being an anti-religious society. That is what many people seek to turn Ireland into.