Speech is not free. It never has been. There's no society on Earth that allows
anyone to shout whatever they want to
with no consequence, although some do allow a small ruling group to do so. If you hold a belief, you take responsibility for what that means. The equality of all citizens before the law trumps the right to freedom of speech, every single time, and speech that tries to undermine that principle of equality cannot be legally protected.
Forstater was very badly advised to use that particular law as the key to her defence - she would have had a better case if she'd gone with a case of being dismissed for holding different political opinions to her co-workers, some of whom, I suspect were getting offended on behalf of hypothetical "other people", but I guess (I haven't looked) that some of the people who aided her are more used to working with religious groups, who can and do use this law.
People who jump loudly to the aid of an imagined victim are as bad as the ones to pig-headedly repeat statements that they know can be offensive. The two feed off each other, and there's no winner.
@Frankiesays -Incidentally, regarding something you mentioned previously about the EHCR. The "Protected Speech" parts of the UK Equality Act regarding religion are an invention of Westminster, and have nothing to do with the European Court of Human Rights. I live in a country whose judiciary fully recognises the authority of the EHCR, yet there is no similar law on the Irish statute book.
We do, however have a written constitution that says that citizens have a right "to express freely their convictions and opinions", but that this is "subject to public order and morality". This provision comes after a statement that all citizens are equal (again, the right to equality of treatment beats the right to public speech) Morality is not described in religious terms (or at all), and in fact, we recently removed the concept of blasphemy from the constitution, which, to me is a step in the opposite direction to the UK law, yet we are still in alignment with the EHCR's rulings.
This is another example of the long-standing strategy by Westminster politicians of all stripes to blame their own unpopular ideas on "Europe". I'm mildly curious to see how this trick will survive them leaving the European Union, but to be honest, I'm much more concerned for the livelihoods of my friends living there.