However, it's Ireland's problem, and they'll have to deal with it. When the consequences of it become evident, the Irish have established traditions for throwing off tyranny as necessary.
I won't, therefore, bother discussing the law at length; but the frame raises an old debate in an interesting way.
To begin: freedom of speech is not a "God-given" right; no rights really are. We may hold certain rights to be "self-evident," but that is simply a comforting fiction derived from the American Revolution. Rights must be taken, not given and, once won, any attempt to nullify them must be resisted by (in the Communist Left's favorite phrase) "any means necessary." ...Nor are the enshrinement of rights in a nation's constitution any guarantee of perpetuity. Countries come and go; regimes change. The populace undergoes a philosophical and ethnic shift -- a quiet revolution -- and no longer feels any loyalty or allegiance to even bedrock cultural notions from hundreds of years ago. Constitutions become "living," which is to say, dead.
Joel and I had a lengthy debate about whether or not that was the right conception of rights back in 2007, which was itself part of a subset of a debate that had already gone on for quite a while. I was taking roughly the same position as the fellow here: whatever God wants us to have in terms of rights, we have to do the work, in the same way that God created a world in which men could have wine, but there will only actually be wine to drink if we make it anew every year and all the time.
You can find this debate on the sidebar under the heading "Frith & Freedom," it being the first several entries ("The Endowment of Rights" and then several posts citing Beowulf and the Founders).
If you take the position that "a right" belongs to whatever level at which it practically comes to be, the only "natural rights" are the right to die and the right to think. The right to die Nature will defend herself; no matter what efforts are put into trying to force you to stay alive, your right to die really cannot be denied but only delayed. (That formulation puts an unwanted division between Divine Law and Natural Law, but Nature is said to be fallen; in at least this one way the Natural Law is out of order with God's Law).
The right to think, likewise, is beyond human power to deny you. You can be drugged, deprived of sleep, tortured, or killed, and these things can delay thought or prevent it. But as long as you are not dead, during whatever moments of clarity your torturers leave you, you have the power to keep your own counsel. You may not be able to say anything about it or do anything about it, but your ability to think through the world is something they can only try to influence from the outside.
I have, in more recent years, argued that this inalienable right to thought implies also a right to speak: if your ability to think rationally about the world is a source of your human dignity (or the source, as Kant has it), then we ought also to respect your right to express those thoughts. By the same token, I have argued that the dignity that inheres in human beings implies an inalienable right to self-defense, which in turn grants necessarily the right to the means to defend one's self.
Those things I think are rational truths that ought to follow from the limited things that Nature really does defend. They can be said to be natural rights because they are direct or necessary logical consequences of natural rights. In that way, they really ought to be part of any political system whatsoever; no government, which is always and only a human-created institution, ought to violate these pre-political truths about human nature.
Even so, if that view is to be realized in the face of all the human beings who desperately want to exert their domination and mastery over others, it must be defended. These defenses may morally be as emphatic as necessary, and furthermore they ought to be, because something more fundamental and important to humanity than that particular government's survival is at stake.
