Given the state of the country these days, even the most mild-mannered of us might be occasionally tempted to take the name of our Lord in vain.

If so, you'd better check first to make sure that Dermot Ahern is nowhere within hearing distance.

For reasons that God alone knows, the Minister for Justice has launched a legal crusade against blasphemy -- presumably designed to drag us back to the good old days when Monty Python's Life of Brian was banned in Irish cinemas

Even by the standards we've come to expect from Dermot Ahern, his choice of priorities here is truly breathtaking.

It's less than a month since the cold-blooded murder of Roy Collins in Limerick, a shocking event that proves we live in a society where people cannot testify in court without putting their own lives in danger.

He didn't show up to speak to gardai in conference this week; he apparently was too busy elsewhere. And today he couldn't be found at the conference of prison officers either.

Unbelievable. Indeed unprecedented. And most certainly seen as a snub by the forces of law and order.

At a time of a criminal jsutice crisis in this country we need a justice minister who is prepared to take the gloves off in the national struggle against gangland crime.

Instead, Ahern is apparently focused on introducing a new crime of "blasphemous libel" in a proposed amendment to his Defamation Bill -- to bring the law in line with an old article of the constitution that few people have heard of and even fewer care about.

Even worse, he's indicated that valuable garda time will be wasted in trying to enforce it.

If the new law is passed, offenders will face fines of up to €100,000 and have their homes raided by members of the Garda in order to seize the offending material.

Touchingly, the Minister insists that his hands are tied on this one -- the Constitution prohibits blasphemy, so there has to be a law against it on the statute books.

In reality, he could simply have followed the wise example of his immediate predecessors and ignored the matter completely.

The other option would be to hold a referendum on removing the words from the Constitution altogether, which would surely pass with a massive majority -- although even that would be giving the issue an importance it hardly deserves.

It all comes down to the age-old question of freedom of speech versus the right not to be offended, an area in which this country does not exactly have an unblemished track record.

These days, however, most Irish people have more common sense than Dermot Ahern clearly gives us credit for.

Incidents such as the fatwa on Salman Rushdie or the banning of Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad would simply not be tolerated here -- if only because the bloody history of Northern Ireland has taught us what can happen when religious bigots are allowed to impose their version of morality on everybody else.

This, of course, is not the first time that Ahern has devoted his energies to solving non-existent problems while the body count rises out in the real world.

Gag

He appears to be hell-bent on pushing through privacy legislation that hypocritical TDs, crooked bankers and dangerous criminals will be able to use to prevent the media from reporting their activities.

As a heavy-handed attempt to gag the press, it raises the question of whose side the Minister is actually on in the first place.

On television recently,Ahern dismissed criticism of the recent U-turns on TDs' pay by insisting that budgets are only "a statement of intent" in the first place. If that's the way he regards the crime problem too, it certainly explains a lot.

It leaves us all wondering how on earth we got stuck with this guy in charge of the law at such a dangerous period for our system of criminal justice. You couldn't make it up.

- Andrew Lynch