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Is Ireland's outdated blasphemy law in danger of becoming a laughing stock?

IF Stephen Fry has never made you laugh before, then in his latest sketch, hosted by our very own Ireland, he surely must have.

In this piece of now internationally-known comedy, Fry is interviewed by Gay Byrne about matters of life and death.

In the course of the interview the English comedian says that if he met God he would point out such things as bone cancer in children and then ask ‘why should I respect such a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God?’

Not exactly hilarious in itself, but what follows was pure comedy gold.

With echoes of Flann O’Brien’s classic The Third Policeman, and the eternal garda query: ‘Is it about a bicycle?’, an unnamed gentleman contacted the police to report that Fry had committed blasphemy.

An age of outrage

Now, we live in age of permanent outrage. You only have to spend five minutes on the internet, or looking at the comments on social media, to see that no one does things there by halves.

You only have to look at the careers of anyone from Eamon Dunphy to Katie Hopkins to see that some people make a living out of outrage.

I’m sure, too, that the gardaí encounter any number of peculiar interactions with the general public.

The idea, though, of someone turning up at the local cop shop and saying they’ve got God outside and He’s mortified about what someone just said about Him on the television is too good to be true.

If we didn’t laugh at ourselves before, we are now. After all, everyone else surely is.

Scroll down to watch Stephen Fry's interview with Gay Byrne

The fact that the blasphemy case is not, after investigation, going to be pursued by the gardaí is not really the point, however much we have to acknowledge the comedy gold possibilities of a comedian being brought to court for insulting God.

The point is that we even have this law at all. The point is that in Ireland in 2017 that blasphemy is even a ‘thing’.

The point is that this is not some archaic law that some crank has unearthed, but a piece of legislation that was updated as recently as 2009 and signed in to law by President Mary McAleese.

If we were being generous, we might interpret the updated 2009 legislation with its emphasis on ‘any religion’ as a clumsy attempt to recognise Ireland as a more multi-cultural society.

I have to note, though, that the legislation itself states that blasphemy is committed if it causes, amongst members of a religion, ‘outrage’.

Ah, outrage. Well, whatever anyone else is outraged about does not have to necessarily concern you. Whatever they are outraged about on Facebook or Twitter does not have to bother you for one minute. How much more that is magnified by being outraged on God’s behalf is hard to quantify.

Yes, there are many people in our society who need protecting and I, for one, am a supporter rather than a critic of political correctness as an attempt to make derogatory speech about people on the basis of their skin, race, nationality, gender or disability socially unacceptable.

I was brought up to have good manners; and whilst I might not always have them, surely political correctness is just an extension of that.

God can take care of Himself

One person in our society, though, who does not need our protection is God. God does not need to be protected from what we might say about Him.

We don’t need to look out for God at all. God, really, out of all of us, can take care of Himself.

In Ireland, in particular, this is even more so. An institutionalised and cossetted God held sway here for a long time and we are still hearing about what that led to.

We are still hearing about the dumped babies and the stolen childhoods. We are still hearing what a society where you couldn’t raise your voice against God sounded like.

Just recently, numerous voices have been heard objecting to any possibility of religious involvement in a new maternity hospital and the dangers of those who might listen to God’s voice and not that of medicine.

That alone was a sign of how far Ireland has come and how far we have left that old power behind.

This blasphemy hullabaloo was like a shout from a past that we would all do well to remember and all, in this instance, do well to laugh at.

The sooner we get that ridiculous law off the books the better and then we can all laugh at something else.

God only knows why we wouldn’t.