We will defend to the death our right to exercise our prejudices

THE last time an international stir was caused by desecrating sacred images, it was one of our own who did it.

Sinead O'Connor, appearing on the US TV programme Saturday Night Live, tore up a picture of the pope.

Cynics believed the singer was in one of her bouts of self-exorcism, each of which tends to revive her career.

Traditional Catholic viewers in the United States were outraged and sufficiently organised about their outrage to reduce to nil the chances of the singer ever appearing on that programme again. The rest of us wished, for her own sake and ours, the girl would just shut up and sing.

Nobody suggested that every Catholic Irish citizen sympathised with her action, although a fair number of Catholic Irish citizens at the time were living lives incongruent with what John Paul II stood for.

Nobody suggested it was the duty of the rest of us to come out and symbolically Sellotape pictures of the pope back together again.

Nobody in Ireland saw Sinead as epitomising a central democratic value, that of freedom of expression. No French TV station invited her to come and tear up papal pictures on their prime time show to further vindicate that right.

Now, OK, the pope isn't or wasn't a prophet. But, to believers, he is the personification, the representative of Christ on earth.

Tearing up his picture would seem at first glance to be at least as offensive as running singularly unfunny cartoons of Mohammed with a bomb on his head.

The first key difference is that those offended by the singer's actions were, for the most part, female, middle-aged or older, reasonably well-off and with an understanding of commercial influence.

Commercial influence in the US means reaching advertisers. Influencing the sponsor of a particular programme can inhibit that programme-maker's commitment to freedom of expression a lot more effectively than young people beating themselves with open razors in another country.

The power of reaching the advertiser is illustrated by George Clooney's new movie about Edward R Murrow, the broadcaster credited with destroying McCarthyism in America. Murrow eventually showed courage in facing down, not just Joe McCarthy, but also the paranoid mindset which produced him.

However, in advance of demonstrating that courage, Murrow had notably failed to support his colleague, William Shirer, when Shirer was effectively silenced by a shaving-cream manufacturer which stopped sponsoring his radio programme because it saw him as dangerously liberal.

In addition, Murrow, in the early 50s, quietly signed a loyalty oath administered by his employer which clearly inhibited his freedom of expression, apparently because Campbell's Soup had withdrawn their sponsorship of his TV show, scaring him about his career prospects.

Quiet commercial power has always been the most effective method of silencing discomfiting dissident voices.

The recent parading of freedom of expression as an absolute right misses a number of points. It first of all ignores the relative significance of visual representations in different religions and cultures.

When the Adelaide Hospital was persuaded to join with the Meath and the National Children's Hospital as part of the Tallaght Hospital, those running the Adelaide made it clear that the ethos of their hospital would be continued on the new site.

This meant, among other things, that the new hospital would not have crucifixes and statues of Our Lady all over the place, as is the case in many hospitals originally created by Catholic congregations, because those physical representations would be offensive to Protestant patients.

Much self-congratulation went on at the time about the Adelaide transferring its ethos, undiluted, to Tallaght.

But what we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history, even recent history. In this particular instance, a wider understanding of just how offensive visual representation of a deity can be to a minority never developed.

PLURALISM, diversity and liberalism in Ireland and elsewhere too often takes the form of permission without learning: you do your weird stuff and the rest of us will let you at it as long as you don't try to make us understand it.

Because we don't care that much about anything anymore, particularly not about embarrassing concepts like God, eternity and divine intervention, our definition of tolerance has shifted to an uninvolved patronising of different views. And that's putting it positively.

True liberalism sets out to understand opposing points of view. False liberalism assumes that our point of view is the only point of view. Never mind that your core, your animating beliefs are offended by our pointless self-expression.

We will use the only quotation we remember from Voltaire to defend to the death our right to freedom of cartoon, even if those cartoons are objectively without value and serve no purpose other than confirming our own prejudices.

Clothed in self-righteousness, one French publication reprinted the cartoons this weekend. Their tiny publication sold 400,000 copies. Their tiny publication's name is now known within France and throughout the world. That adds up to a not insignificant commercial payoff for freedom of expression.

Move the time-frame back to the period of the Irish famine, when the British publication, Punch, ran grossly offensive cartoons of the Irish, portraying them as drunken apes. Punch demonstrated freedom of expression.

Had a French magazine decided to further vindicate that right by reprinting the cartoons, would present-day Irish liberal thought congratulate them? Hardly. Any more than we would approve if they re-published anti-Semitic cartoons from Nazi Germany.

Freedom of speech is a recent Western construct and a nuanced one at that. It allows us to pat ourselves on the back for condemning Islamic extremists while continuing to trade with and holiday in states where execution is the ultimate punishment for crime and flogging is a daily deterrent.

It allows us to get worked up about the right to publish cartoons while investing in countries where there is no such right. It allows us to Google happily, despite Google's knuckling under to the Chinese government to control freedom of information-flow to the millions of citizens in that country.

It further allows us to widen the argument about cartoons to take in clothing and portray the insistence of one culture on veiling its women as an egregious limitation on their freedom.

It never strikes those advancing this theory that every nation in the West has rules about women's clothing. If a woman walks topless past a building site in any city in Ireland, two consequences are inevitable.

Firstly, she'll be abused and characterised as a whore. Secondly, a garda will tell her to cover up and if she doesn't, take her into custody.

Traditionally, the limitation on freedom of speech was defined as a ban on yelling "fire!" in a crowded theatre, because doing so would endanger hundreds of people who might irrationally stampede to get away from the threat.

Insisting on the right to reprint offensive cartoons, at a time when doing so could endanger thousands of people is a modern version of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre.

Nobody gains. Everybody loses.