Society should ask itself whether defending freedom of speech is in its interest, or in the interests of particular editors in the media, according to senior diplomat Antoin MacUnfraidh.
One had to question whether editorial decisions were "informed by ethics" or by the "commercial viability" of the product, Mr MacUnfraidh told the annual Cúirt literary debate in Galway at the weekend.
Currently Irish ambassador to Finland, Mr MacUnfraidh was speaking in a personal capacity on the theme "Freedom of speech - a right or a weapon?"
Freedom of speech was clearly a weapon, and a useful one, which we should be careful not to blunt, he said. It was also a shield, but the prior condition of using it as such was equality of access to the media.
He believed that many Muslims felt excluded and Islamic public opinion could identify a number of grievances with the way the West dealt with certain governments. This approach involved support for corrupt regimes if they favoured the West, and an emphasis on human rights if they did not.
A lack of respect for Islam was part of a "glibness" about 2,000 years of Christianity and 1,500 years of Islam, Mr MacUnfraidh said. In Ireland, some 60 per cent of the population still professed to be believers. However, religion had been substituted by secularism in parts of western Europe.
Also contributing to the debate, which was chaired by Prof John Horgan of Dublin City University, Lara Marlowe, Paris-based correspondent for The Irish Times, recalled the recent controversy over cartoons depicting Muhammad which had fuelled resentment against the West.
In this context, it was "ironic" that the US state department had denounced the 12 cartoons of Muhammad - published in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, last year, and republished earlier this year by other European newspapers - as "provocative". She welcomed the fact that The Irish Times did not re-print the images, which were not about freedom of speech in her view.
She said French philosopher Michel Gachet had noted that with the exception of the US, religious practice was declining in the West whereas it was increasing in the Muslim world. The West displayed an ignorance and indifference to the Muslim world which was punctuated by "occasional bouts of fear and panic".
Ms Marlowe concurred with US political scientist Samuel P Huntington's theory that while nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, the principal conflicts of global politics in the future involve a "clash of civilisations". Since 2001 this threat had become "infinitely worse".
Referring to respect for people's beliefs, she said she preferred the term "respecting the believers", and there was a responsibility attached to freedom of expression. "Just because you have the right to do something, that doesn't mean you do it," she said.
Dunya Mikhail, Iraqi poet and former literary editor of the Baghdad Observer, said that there was no doubt that the cartoons had escalated tensions, but she saw an irony in the vehement reaction to the publication.
The reaction was in "two different languages", and Muslims should have pointed out that the cartoons were "racist". In the West, there was a form of implicit censorship which preceded speech, while censorship in the Arab world "followed speech".
Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy attributed "cynical political motives" to the Egyptian and Saudi Arabian governments in relation to the publication of the Danish cartoons. The cartoons were published last September, but the row did not break out until January because it was politically expedient then. She disagreed with the clash of civilisations theory, because in her view there was "no homogenous West and no monolithic Islam". There were a minority of fundamentalists everywhere, and in this context her own writing had been censored.
