The chances of a successful prosecution for blasphemy in the Irish courts are slim, writes Carol Coulter, Legal Affairs Correspondent
While the Constitution and the law in Ireland prohibit blasphemy, the only attempt to mount such a prosecution in the State's history ended in failure.
The case had obvious parallels with the current controversy. It involved a cartoon, alleged to insult the Blessed Sacrament, which was published in the Sunday Independent in 1995 following the divorce referendum, alongside an article by Conor Cruise O'Brien.
It depicted a plump and comic caricature of a priest, who was holding a host in his right hand and a chalice in his left. He appeared to be offering it to John Bruton, Ruairí Quinn and Proinsias De Rossa, members of the government of the day which had sponsored the referendum.
They seemed to be turning away and waving goodbye. The caption read: "Hello progress - goodbye Father", an apparent pun on one of the debate's slogans "Hello Divorce, Goodbye Daddy".
John Corway, a carpenter from Harold's Cross in Dublin, brought an action under the 1961 Defamation Act claiming that the cartoon appeared calculated to insult the feelings and religious convictions of readers generally by treating the sacraments of the Eucharist as objects of derision. The Act prohibits "blasphemous libel", with penalties ranging from £500 to seven years penal servitude.
According to Article 40.6 of the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression, "the publication or utterance of blasphemous . . . matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law."
Mr Corway lost his action in the High Court, where Mr Justice Geoghegan said he did not believe the facts complained of amounted to blasphemy. Mr Corway then appealed to the Supreme Court.
In its judgment, this court said that neither the Constitution nor the Act defined blasphemy. It referred to the Law Reform Commission report on libel, outlining the history of the crime of blasphemy.
This crime had its origins in English law, where the Church of England was the Established church, as was the (Protestant) Church of Ireland in Ireland until 1869. The last prosecution in Ireland for blasphemy, which arose out of the inadvertent burning of a Bible, took place in 1855.
The 1922 Constitution was secular, but the 1937 Constitution introduced a section where the State "acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God" and undertakes to honour religion.
But the Supreme Court continued, "it would appear that the legislature has not adverted to the problem of adapting the common law crime of blasphemy to the circumstances of a modern State which embraces citizens of many different religions and which guarantees freedom of conscience and a free profession and practice of religion".
This means no definition of blasphemy exists in Irish law and it is not defined in the Constitution.
"In this state of the law and in the absence of any legislative definition of the constitutional offence of blasphemy, it is impossible to say of what the offence of blasphemy consists," the Supreme Court concluded.
It was up to the legislature to provide such a definition, not the courts.
Referring to the case before it, "the cartoon may indeed have been in very bad taste. But the court, having studied the cartoon and the article by Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien which accompanies it, is convinced that no insult to the Blessed Sacrament was intended and that no jury could reasonably conclude that such insult existed."
Mr Corway lost his case, and costs were awarded against him. This contrasts with the the UK, where in 1979, anti-"indecency" campaigner Mary Whitehouse won a blasphemy case in the House of Lords.