NORTHERN IRELAND (2)
Eminent Bogy
Kevin O'Connor
The remarks of the Irish Prime Minister in London last week that the Constitution of the Republic is ' negotiable ' ignores one weighty presence in the Irish conscience, the venerable and stern figure ' of 'His Eminence ' the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid.
As recently as last month two of his pronouncements served to compound the continuing fears of Northern Protestants as to their likely fate in any United Ireland. More pertinently, the remarks of the arch-conservative Archbishop have gone unchallenged by the government of Mr Lynch and thus negated the efforts of the past year to offer some olive branch of compromise to Protestants on critical matters of education and family health.
In the area of education — which is largely clerically dominated — the projected creation of twenty-five new community schools had initially offered hope to liberals and objective educationalists of a lessening of Church influence. The proportionate representation of the various interests, clerical and lay, on the boards of managements of the schools has been the subject of bitter wrangling during the past year. Eventually the government gave way to Church pressure and conceded majority influence to clerical interests, which ,occasioned the Archbishop to crow, in October, that the 'community' schools will be: "Catholic schools to which, because of their management and teaching staff, their discipline and curriculum, parents can send their children with full confidence.
Not surprisingly, the Republic's Protestants, who had feared such a coup all along, became more strident in their demands for separate Protestant schools. Thus in the past month has been compounded the educational apartheid which is such a critical ingredient of Northern sectarianism. And in the wider context, Mr Lynch's hands-across-theBorder rhetoric of July 1970, in which he urged the necessity of "cherishing that other great (Protestant) tradition in our history," now sounds cynically hollow.
Then, earlier this month, the Primate of Ireland (but not of all Ireland — that title is reserved for the Cardinal who resides in Ulster) further fuelled Orange fears. Opening a new centre for the teaching of obstetrics and gynaecology to doctors, Dr McQuaid stated that he had received an assurance that the teaching of the centre "would be rightly based on the objective moral law." Nobody in Dublin doubts that what the Archbishop meant was that there would be no training in general methods of contraception and family planning. Again, the implications go wider than recitation of conservative dogma when one considers that one in three of the country's doctors will receive training at the centre. Not to mention the numbers who perforce will come to Britain to practise and who will be thus incompetent to advise their British patients on such matters (Irish-trained doctors form around 12 per cent of British medical practitioners).
Thus at a time when — in response to Northern carnage — the Republic's institutions are taking a hard look at areas of possible compromise, one institution at least has set its face against any change — at whatever cost.
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