The Passion of Stephen Fry (or why Ireland badly needs a new constitution)
By Pádraig Belton
Ireland – a country lately undergoing a thoroughgoing, much-needed update in the eyes of the world – has headlines for an investigation Stephen Fry for the eminently modern crime of blasphemy.
Fry, whose previous visits to Ireland include a good-spirited turn as an English tourist in the Irish-language soap Ros na Rún, made a 2015 appearance on RTÉ's religion programme The Meaning of Life. Fry, we might have noticed, tends to speak his mind, and on this occasion, his mind was that God is “capricious, mean-spirited, stupid” for creating “a world that is so full of injustice and pain”. (Quick readers will notice this is the problem of theodicy, a commonplace of theology classrooms but which apparently is not to be raised in the Irish Republic.)
And in the last few days, after receiving a complaint, Ireland's police, the Gardaí, have been investigating Fry for blasphemy. The investigation was subsequently dropped, because, the Gardaí said, they couldn’t find enough people who were offended by Fry’s views.
The UK abolished the common law offence of blasphemy in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, though it was effectively dead from 1917, when in Bowman v Secular Society, Lord Sumner pointedly quoted the Emperor Tiberius, deorum injuriae diis curae “offences to the gods are dealt with by the gods.”
But Ireland's 1937 Constitution – a strange document deeply in need of updating – requires the state to have a blasphemy law, and so obediently, Section 36 of the Defamation Act 2009 defines a new indictable offence of “Publication or utterance of blasphemous matter.”
2009. This isn't the mediaeval period, or even the bad old days of De Valera's 1950s.
This was a year after Bertie and Ian Paisley jointly opened a visitor centre on the site of the Battle of the Boyne; three weeks after the Blasphemy Act passed into law, Mary Robinson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Obama. New Ireland, in a sudden fit of absence of mind, reverted to old habits and went mediaeval.
In 2009, the drafters congratulate themselves that they'd widened blasphemy so that offences against religions other than Christianity could also be illegal. In their minds, I'm sure, they'd moved Ireland forward by miles.
Ireland's in cosy company - with Pakistan, say, where after Zia's 1986 Islamicisation of the penal code, § 295C proscribes the interesting sentence of “mandatory death and fine” for defiling the name of the Prophet of Islam.
But Fry joins a very illustrious lineage, of people accused of blasphemy in Ireland. Usually it was a handy way of offing political opponents – this was the case with Adam Dubh Ó Tuathail, from a Gaelic landowning family in the Wicklow mountains, whom the leaders of the nearby Anglo-Norman Pale found annoying. (It didn't end well for Adam, who was burned at the stake in 1328.)
The scholarly and splendidly named Archbishop Narcissus Marsh, whose book collection still continues as Marsh's Library, attempted to begin a private prosecution against a Mr Fleming, a Presbyterian minister in Drogheda, for being a Presbyterian. Even by 17th century standards this was reckoned a bit embarrassing, and the Dublin Castle administration discreetly managed to drop it.
Dean Swift’s retort to Marsh was characteristically savage. Swift – perhaps the 17th century Fry, just better – said of Marsh “He is the first of human race, that with great advantages of learning, piety, and station ever escaped being a great man.”
In 1852, in Mayo a Franciscan monk named John Syngean Bridgman actually managed to get himself convicted under the common law offence of blasphemy for burning a Bible. It was the translation he objected to – it wasn't Douay-Rheims, you see.
Then ensued a spate of prosecutions, all somehow involving the burning of Bibles, generally by monks. Vladimir Petcherine, a Redemptorist, in 1855 managed to burn a Bible by mistake in a bonfire of irreligious books. It happens. (He was acquitted.)
Generally from poor Adam on it was always about politics (this also is the case in modern-day Pakistan, whose blasphemy prosecutions usually result from local score-settling) – religion only getting into it by chance. And so you wonder, for the unknown complainant who toddled down to their local Garda station to register a blasphemy complaint - surely the fact Stephen Fry is English wasn't part of it at all.
More important from the perspective of Ireland's 1937 constitution, it's becoming clearer and clearer that instead of piecemeal revision, it's time for a rewrite.
A constitution isn't fit for purpose if it requires the state to have a blasphemy law, declares society to be based on the institution of marriage, prohibits abortion against the wishes of 75 per cent of the population, and includes curious anachronisms like “The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion.”
If it's the impetus for Ireland motivating itself to write the much-needed 2020 Constitution, then some good might come of the persecution of Stephen Fry. Which is how the religiously minded explain the problem of evil, anyway.
Pádraig Belton is a journalist based in Dublin, and contributor to the BBC, Spectator, Prospect, and New Statesman. He is completing a doctorate in politics at Oxford.
@PadraigBelton
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Today’s celebration of stage Irishness comes with an unusual element – a US president making no pretence of Irish roots.
Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach, traveled to the White House on Thursday to meet a new president whose most notable nod to the Irish-American community during his campaign was some inappropriate talk at the Al Smith fundraising dinner in front of New York’s Irish Catholic establishment.
The president, a teetotaller of notoriously infantile palate (as the menu at the Trump Tower restaurant testifies), is unlikely to have reached for the bittersweet comfort of a pint of Guinness to mark the occasion, and the Taoiseach’s special pleading for “undocumented” Irish migrants in the US probably fell on deaf ears, in spite of the supposed strong representation of Irish Americans in Trump's inner circle. His cursory “I love Ireland, I’ll be there” when asked if he’d be visiting the country was a tad insipid from a man from whom overstatement is his everyday manner.
That is not to say Trump is unengaged in Ireland: he is, we know, very interested in planning permissions for his golf course in County Clare, even if he does seem to think that all Irish local planning applications are run via Brussels. But this is purely transactional: the president of America can’t even be bothered lying to us, or at least lying to us with the vigour with which he lies to everyone else.
This leaves Irish people with an interesting dilemma: should we stop playing to type - a type largely created in the United States in the first place?
People born on the island of Ireland have always had a complex relationship with “Irishness”, an idea we don’t always feel confident we fully own: the Patrick’s Day Parade is an imposition, a backward projection onto the island from those who had left or never been there in the first place. The dominance of the aforementioned Guinness in the country’s image globally makes some feel like we are essentially the cast of a beer advert. We latch onto the stereotypes (drunk, poet, drunk poet) while simultaneously rejecting them.
One of the stranger Irish folk beliefs is the idea of the changeling. Fairies – who in Irish folklore tend to act with unswerving menace toward humans – are said to kidnap a person and leave a doppelganger fairy in their place to cause havoc for the people around them. As late as 1895, a woman named Bridget Cleary was burned to death by her husband who accused her of being a fairy.
Irishness, imposed from outside can sometimes feel like a fairy changeling, a perverse approximation – close enough to seem familiar to our own experiences identity, but still foreign and troublesome.
Keeping up the Irishness act, in large part, was about placating our Irish-American cousins. It would not do to shatter their illusions, to disturb their nostalgia for a place that never really existed anywhere, when everyone from Henry Ford to Gene Kelly was sending dollars our way. De Valera famously spent a large part of the War of Independence raising money for the cause in the United States. At the other end of that, a large part of the credit for the current peace on the island can be credited to the Clinton administration’s interest in resolving the issue.
But is now the time to repackage Irishness for sale in new markets? The Brexit vote has served to heighten many Irish people’s sense of themselves as Europeans, engaged in a project and an outlook far removed from the twinkling Tin Pan Alley package.
The bitter irony is that for much of Europe, we are seen through the prism of the Irish pub, ubiquitous across the continent, and bearing much more similarity to the Irish-American bar than anything found in the old country.
Are we to be eternally bedevilled by our own changeling identity?
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Man created God, God didn’t create man. Hitchens describes this creation as an ineradicable problem that humanity cannot solve.
Religion takes advantage of our bad wiring and selfishness. We would be better off if we grew out of it, but until we give up wishful thinking and our fear of death, it is impossible”.
Although religion is an incurable affliction, Hitchens argues that western leaders must not dismiss the threat posed by it.
“The possible interception of messianic ideas with apocalyptic weaponry is increasingly something to be worried about.”
Our predisposition towards order and security undermines our struggle for liberty. For Hitchens, this explains why liberation struggles are so rare and so unsatisfactory.
“Most people, most of the time, have no great desire to be free. We would rather have the trouble of putting up with oppression rather than having the trouble of throwing it off.”
With the threat posed by religion and our apathy towards liberty, Hitchens believes the ultimate enemy we face is censorship. Hitchens argues that all things associated with enlightenment are worth dying for. He describes the struggle against censorship as “a fight that can be won but certainly one that cannot be lost”.