Ireland has been criticised – even condemned – once again because the performer and writer Stephen Fry has been accused of blasphemy, under the country’s 2009 Blasphemy Act.
When Mr Fry appeared on RTÉ Television, in 2015, the interviewer Gay Byrne asked him what he would say if, after death, he encountered God. Fry then described the Judaeo-Christian God as “utterly evil”, and “a capricious, mean-spirited and stupid God … a maniac, an utter maniac” – because of all the suffering in the world. (He added that he wouldn’t object to a meeting with the ancient Greek gods, because they were more “human”.)
