Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Key day for Irish Blasphemy Law

A couple of months ago I wrote about the very scary proposed new Irish blasphemy law which could mean the likes of me being fined 100,000 euros for, well, uttering anything that could cause outrage amongst followers of any religion.

While I see this law as an attack on freedom of expression, there's nothing that I, as a Scot, can do about it. Happily, though, in the last couple of months, a vigorous campaign
has been mounted against it. It's on Facebook, and Twitter. They've also done the old fashioned thing of going round talking to people and holding meetings the length and breadth of the country.

Tomorrow, the Justice Committee of the Irish Parliament discusses the law and could if it wanted choose to kill it off. If you are Irish and have a view on this, you might like to contact its members. There e-mail addresses are printed below:

thomas.byrne@oireachtas.ie,
niall.collins@oireachtas.ie,
sean.connick@oireachtas.ie,
jdeenihan@eircom.net,
bwk@eircom.net,
dinny.mcginley@oireachtas.ie,
michael.mulcahy@oireachtas.ie,
denis.naughten@oireachtas.ie,
darragh.obrien@oireachtas.ie,
boshea@eircom.net,
pat.rabbitte@oireachtas.ie,
noel.treacy@oireachtas.ie

There was an excellent article in the Sunday Times the other day which suggested that there were quite a number of groups representing a huge chunk of the Irish population which might like to change quite a lot of the Irish constitution, a document which, with its mention of god and family does not reflect modern Ireland. There's a certain irony in the fact that Irish people are to be asked again to ratify the Lisbon Treaty (because they didn't get the answer right first time), yet the Government steadfastly refuses to offer referenda on changing the constitution on the same day.

Let's hope that common sense prevails and that Ireland doesn't regress to the middle ages by passing such a ridiculous law and that the Justice Committee puts this measure out of its misery tomorrow.

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