Done. Thanks for getting the ball rolling @dfaris!
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I don’t think that has anything to do with the blasphemy laws though, in fact the last couple of prosecutions in 1850s were all related to Catholics burning Protestant bibles (so the law was being used to ‘protect’ the Protestant religion, though even then there were no convictions in those cases). If you go further back you can find some convictions, but they were usually against Unitarians, Puritans and Presbyterians, not a tool for persecution of Catholics. You have to go as far back as the 1300s to find examples of the law being used against the natives.
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Fair enough. I’m just talking about the language that Fry is using, and how someone in Ireland might interpret it and why they might to do so. It will have as much to do with perceptions of the history of British as much as the reality of it.
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Perhaps God is testing Stephen Fry?
/religion logic
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I don’t think that has much to do with it either, Fry is hardly seen as a figure of the British establishment (it takes more than posh accent, and he even played Oscar Wilde in a film). Also, the guy who complained in this case explicitly said he wasn’t offended by what was said, so there’s a good chance he made the complaint to simply highlight the stupidity of the law, others have done something similar by reprinting his comments, asking for themselves to also be prosecuted under the law (like with the reprinting of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons). It’s certainly possible there were some little old ladies watching who were genuinely offended (that’s the kind of audience Gay Byrne attracts), but I doubt it would have had anything do with his Englishness, and it obviously wasn’t enough of a problem to make a complaint.
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Okay. Fair enough!
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If you’re looking for a negative reaction from the Irish from something said by an Englishman, and something based in the historical issues you brought up, take a look at the comments on this article:
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Of course we have a similar siluation here in the ol’ US of A.
Colbert defamed God Trump.
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Thanks! I will.
Christ, what an asshole!
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I suspected as much, without detailed insight. I couldn’t imagine the Irish legal doctrine could be exceedingly different from those of other European countries.
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I think you could shorten that to
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Nice independent country you got there!
Be a shame if anything happened to it …
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I am aware. Thanks.
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He’s the son of a Jewish engineer who did his A levels at a community college after getting into trouble over an episode of youthful rebellion. Far from being Establishment, like many Cambridge graduates who went into light entertainment, he’s actually an anti-Establishment figure.
(I mention the Jewish bit only because it comes over in his books, and to make it clear that his background is totally not aristocratic.)
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I’m afraid your post came over like some things I’ve heard in the past from Americans whose knowledge of Ireland and its politics were at best questionable, though at least unlike that Representative whose name I forget you didn’t refer to “Getting British troops of the streets of Dublin”. I shall now calm down somewhat.
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My point was less that “religion explains everything” and more like “religion is a factor in understanding Irish history.”
And, no, I am no expert on Irish history, by any means. I’m happy to take criticism when I get it wrong, because part of understanding history is understanding that we don’t know everything.
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I see the plausibility of the complainant shaming the state into wiping this law off the books but i’d like to see it go to court, though i doubt that it will, and i imagine fry would be there with bells on. That’d be a fun transcript to read.
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Given that Fry doesn’t believe in God and was answering a hypothetical question, I don’t see how this can be blasphemy.
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