MURPHY v. IRELAND JUDGMENT 23 applicant purchased the relevant broadcasting time (Barthold v. Germany, judgment of 25 March 1985, Series A no. 90, § 58). 71. The main factor which the Government considered justified the impugned prohibition was the particular religious sensitivities in Irish society which they submitted were such that the broadcasting of any religious advertising could be considered offensive. The applicant agreed that Article 10 permitted restrictions of religious expression which would offend others' religious sensitivities but submitted that the Convention did not protect an individual from being exposed to a religious view simply because it did not accord with his or her own, noting that his advertisement was innocuous and completely inoffensive. In any event, he disputed the Government's assessment of contemporary religious sensitivities in Ireland. 72. The Court agrees that the concepts of pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness on which any democratic society is based (the above-cited Handyside judgment, at § 49) mean that Article 10 does not, as such, envisage that an individual is to be protected from exposure to a religious view simply because it is not his or her own. However, the Court observes that it is not to be excluded that an expression, which is not on its face offensive, could have an offensive impact in certain circumstances. The question before the Court is therefore whether a prohibition of a certain type (advertising) of expression (religious) through a particular means (the broadcast media) can be justifiably prohibited in the particular circumstances of the case. 73. Turning therefore to the country-specific religious sensitivities relied on by the Government, the Court has noted that the Minister identified, during the debate on the introduction of section 20(4) of the 1960 Act, the potential impact on religious sensitivities as justifying prudence in the context of the broadcasting of religious advertising and he drew a distinction between advertising time which was purchased and programming (paragraph 22 above). Section 20(4) was then applied to independent broadcasters through section 10(3) of the 1988 Act, the provision at issue in the present case. The Court has noted that, during the detailed debate on a proposed dilution of section 10(3) in April 1999, the Minister emphasised at some length the extreme sensitivity of the question of broadcasting of religious advertising in Ireland and the consequent necessity to proceed towards any proposed amendment of section 10(3) with care and on the basis of a full consideration of the issues and options (paragraphs 27-28 above). Moreover, the domestic courts found that the Government were entitled to be prudent in this context. In particular, the High Court considered relevant the fact that religion had been a divisive issue in Northern Ireland. It further considered that Irish people with religious beliefs tended to belong to a particular church so that religious advertising from a different church might be considered offensive and open to the interpretation of proselytism.