State should consider limiting ‘extreme’ blasphemy – former AG

The Government should explain whether it believes it ought to be legal to publish anything at all of a blasphemous nature, a former attorney general has said.

Speaking in a debate in the Seanad about next month’s referendum on repealing the constitutional ban on blasphemy, Senator Michael McDowell said that rather than simply repealing the ban, a better amendment would have been that “the right of free speech and freedom of expression guaranteed by the article may be regulated by the State on the grounds of blasphemy, indecency or sedition”.

Mr McDowell said the Constitution should allow the Oireachtas to defend religious sensibility at “some extreme level”.

“I am mystified that we should now say nothing in Ireland can be prosecuted on the grounds that it causes massive offence by its blasphemous character and it cannot be restrained in any way, whereas something which is indecent – pornography of some kind, although these days it would have to be extreme pornography – is still to be criminalised under the Constitution,” he said.

Maintaining that “there are things at the very extreme about which a society is entitled to say, ‘That goes too far’”, Mr McDowell said that if following the October 26 referendum legislation should be brought before the Seanad to decriminalise all forms and all degrees of blasphemy, “we should have a long and searching debate …as to whether that is what the people really want to do”.