Stephen Fry won't be charged — under Irish anti-blasphemy law — for calling God a "maniac."

But he was investigated. It didn't take long, but it still has a chilling effect on the freedom of speech in Ireland. Why does this law even exist?

Eoin Daly, a lecturer in law at the National University of Ireland, Galway, said Mr. Fry was never in any real danger of prosecution. He said the law was introduced in 2009 only because the country’s 1937 constitution required the country to have a blasphemy law, and an earlier one had been struck down in the courts.

Lawmakers did their best to make the 2009 law “almost unenforceable,” with broad exemptions to protect free speech, Mr. Daly said. “There was a constitutional obligation to legislate this offense, but it was not against the constitution to create an offense that was of no use.”

Even if it's unenforceable in the sense that no one will ever be convicted under it...

“We are deluded if we think that the 2009 law is not actively influencing, limiting, even dictating the content that we are offered by our national media,” Emer O’Toole, a professor of Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, wrote on Monday in an op-ed in The Independent, a British paper. “And we are even more deluded if we think that we are living in a secular society.”