Off topic--Ireland and free speech

I don't live in Ireland, so I don't know anything about it, I'm afraid, beyond what was immediately skimmable on Google after I saw your post.

It does seem strange, but in many ways I'm not surprised. It seems to be yet another case of politicians introducing well-intentioned but ill-conceived legislation. Incentivising "outrage", wow. How ridiculous. I wonder how they've defined "outrage"! Or if they've even bothered.

I'm not sure how it'll stand up in practice. European human rights laws might mean that the legislation itself is illegal, if it truly does have the effect of limiting free expression. Somebody has a lengthy legal battle in their future, I think, putting this all to the test. And I think it would take a prosecutor with a lot of free time on his or her hands to bother bringing forward so nebulous a case.

I'm always hesitant to really judge legislation based on what is discussed in the press, though. Journalists are not lawyers! And neither am I, so everything I've just read and said could be completely wrong.

lou has it right, though perhaps expressed a bit more politely than it could otherwise be expressed! ha.

It is knee-jerk legislation (as is most here) that will stand the local politicians in good stead in their little villages "down the country" when they are running for re-election. That is what it's all about.

They are also in the process of(have passed) creating a system of non-jury, no search warrant, phone tapping, etc (very Patriot Act) stuff to crack down on gang crime. When a crime is committed by a gang, they (the gangas) are very efficient at terrorizing potential witnesses and punishing jurors etc. Innocent ppl have been murdered for standing up to them. So even though there are laws and methods already in place to protect the innocent and punish the guilty, they are making lots of noise and drawing attention to themselves (our saviours the lawmakers) about these new laws which are basically unconstitutional. But they will get the brownie points for trying. ... meanwhile wasting time that could be spent on the best ways to address the particularly Irish aspects of the economic downturns. Greenpeace has already started on drawing attention to it.

Don't worry about the blasphemy law. They don't enforce these things anyway, except on the odd occasion when they need publicity. So I think people can still tell their children Santy won't bring them anything if they are bad. Then someone else who wants publicity will challenge the "law" and the EU courts will deem it unconstitutional if the Irish Supreme Court doesn't.

They seem to want to do everything here that doesn't work in America, and they don't do the things that have already been figured out to work well in America. Go figure!

And I am sure we are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off topic... except that the whole thing does amount to institutionalised tease and denial by the government! So there.

Just another poorly thought out censorship law that won't actually work in court, we've had a few of them over here lately...in the UK drawing certain cartoon scenarios is now theoretically illegal, but just like this....no judge is going to convict on it as it's too vaguely defined and goes against certain rights....I don't know if Ireland has any clear 'bill of rights' in its native law, but it's certainly signed up to the the European Bill of Rights which would invalidate that law the second a case was taken to european court.

If there was no back up bill of rights of any kind and the law was stated clearly enough for judges to work with this would certainly be extremely worrying for the Irish, not only for the free speech stuff but the way it's written gets into the murky area of thought crime: the actual offense is for intending to cause outrage. Some religious nuts declare themselves outraged and the legal system then tries to work out what you were thinking when you wrote or spoke.


If you were to try to defend whoever came up with this tosh you'd have to say it could be some attempt at making a version of the recent (and arguably sensible) British 'inciting religious hatred' law.


Bear in mind, almost all, if not all, European countries had blasphemy laws left over from when the church had that much power, and in many countries, including the UK, it was only the European Bill of Rights & its national duplications which finally killed off any possibilty of successful prosecution for blasphemy.

Politics is somewhat of an interest of mine....good job on separating Irish, British and European btw, that'll put a smile on many faces, though perhaps not the Scots