Forget cannabis — Ireland just legalized blasphemy.

The Republic of Ireland, fresh from amending its constitution in May to allow women to have abortions, has taken another, quieter liberalizing step. On Friday the Irish held a referendum on removal of the word “blasphemous” from Article 40.6.1.i of the country’s constitution. The clause states, or used to state, that “The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punished in accordance with law.”

This isn’t a comparative law seminar, but you may notice that this piece of the Irish constitution did not, in itself, outlaw blasphemy. Nor is it a permissive rule, allowing Ireland to outlaw blasphemy regardless of any fine language about free speech elsewhere in the document. (There is some, but Ireland’s constitutional free speech guarantees are explicitly subject to “public order and morality”.)

The rule in the constitution is, or was, that blasphemy shall be punished: a positive obligation is laid upon the authorities.

This had an interesting historical ripple effect (fine, I guess this is a comparative law seminar after all). The constitution itself did not define blasphemy, and Irish law was left with the commonlaw offence of “blasphemous libel,” inherited from British rule, as the only possible means of fulfilling Article 40 in an actual prosecution.

Nobody tried to prosecute for a long time. Even in Ireland, such a prosecution was not in keeping with the temper of the postwar period.

But in 1995, during a hot debate over yet another liberalizing constitutional referendum — the one on divorce — some anti-clerical newspaper items in Irish newspapers attracted the ire of John Corway, a Catholic decency campaigner in Dublin. Corway undertook a private prosecution of the newspapers for blasphemous libel.

Which was rather awkward. “Blasphemous libel” was a piece of old British law that had mostly been invoked, during centuries of Irish subjection, by the state-established Anglo-Irish Protestant church. The courts, presented with Corway’s outraged challenge, decided that the 1937 Constitution could not possibly have intended to preserve the ancient oppressor’s definition of blasphemy. But no distinctively Irish-made concept of legal blasphemy existed to put in its place.

This let the newspapers that Corway was battling wriggle off the hook. But it created a problem for the Irish government to solve, with its duty to punish blasphemy still lingering in the constitution. In 2009 the government tried to meet that duty by creating a new crime, “publication or utterance of blasphemous matter.”

But this, alas, could not be an exclusively Roman Catholic definition of blasphemy.

The “special position” of the Church entrenched in the 1937 Constitution had already been knocked out by, you guessed it, another referendum (1972).

The 2009 law thus defined blasphemy as any material “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion.” Its framers, conscious that this was a recipe for mischief and chaos, were careful to make the new blasphemy law excruciatingly difficult to apply.

They added an explicit defence for “blasphemous” work of “genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value.”

They required that “blasphemous” matter had to have caused outrage to a “substantial number of the adherents” of a religion. And they forbade private prosecutions, heading off Corway types.

The lawyerly tricks worked (don’t they always?).

Nobody has ever been prosecuted under Ireland’s 2009 blasphemy law. The “substantial number of adherents” thing turns out to be crucial for avoiding trouble. If you make a blasphemy complaint to the Garda (the Irish police), you won’t get far unless you can prove that you have a lot of sincerely upset people behind you — preferably in a literal queue.

Yet the existence of a blasphemy law was still somewhat humiliating to Ireland. Countries with more earnest and lethal blasphemy provisions could, and did, point to the Republic as an example of a modern liberal state that had not abandoned the concept. The real and natural answer to the constitutional problem, as Irish governments often hinted and Irish churches of all flavours actively insisted, was to change the constitution itself.

Once that was done, the useless statute could be tossed out anytime.

An important figure in finally making this possible was the English author and entertainment personality Stephen Fry, of all people.

Fry, an outspoken atheist, appeared on the Irish state broadcaster RTE in 2015 and did a ranty, hackneyed bit on a religion program about how God seems to love making humans suffer. It is nothing any Irish person hasn’t heard before, or thought of himself. But the Garda had to admit it had opened an investigative file concerning a well-liked foreign celebrity’s chat-show visit for no better reason than “We technically had to.”

Within months, the Irish PM announced that a constitutional referendum on the blasphemy clause would coincide with the 2018 presidential election. And so it did. Never let it be said that footstomping atheist cranks don’t accomplish anything. (Seriously. That’s a bad opinion that should not be said.) The anti-blasphemy voters won the referendum 65-35 per cent, about the same margin that legal abortion enjoyed in the May referendum.

Although the constitution will change, the criminal law against blasphemy remains on Ireland’s books, for a brief moment. Consider this a travel advisory.

THE REAL ANSWER WAS TO CHANGE THE CONSTITUTION ITSELF. — COLBY COSH

NOBODY TRIED TO PROSECUTE BLASPHEMOUS LIBEL FOR A LONG TIME.