Unique Hibernia
T T school—in England, this was—the debating society used
occasionally to discuss whether Ireland ought not to be towed out into the Atlantic, and sunk. The motion, which would be argued with ponderous levity, was always carried ; but I like to think that it would have been lost had the disputants not felt comfortably certain that their decision would have no effect. The law, for the same reason, was always voted a hass. Jf school debating societies still debate the motion, they might be interested to know that the first part of the prop6sition, if not the second, appears to be in progress, though not quite in the manner expected. Great efforts are being made to tow Ireland away from England ; and in some ways they are being successful.
This is nothing to do with the politicians. They hoisted sail with elaborate fuss last year, when the Republic was declared ; but they knew perfectly well that the ship of State was firmly aground on sterling, and that all the declarations of independence are worth nothing so long as our pound notes continue to inform bearer that he can receive £1 for them on demand in London. The drift from England is hardly noticeable on the material level ; it is to be found—to appropriate the title of the most recent attempt to explain the Irish to themselves—in the Face and Mind of Ireland.
Consider, as a symptom, the strange case of " The Liberal Ethic." Under this headline, the Irish Times some months ago gave a report of a talk given by the Very Rev. Felim 0 Briain, Professor of Philosophy at Galway University. For weeks afterwards the correspondence columns of the newspaper were inflated by a controversy upon some of the matters which the Professor had raised, and others that he had not. Father 0 Briain himself joined in at great length—one of his letters filled over three columns— and in the end he was left, by editorial fiat, in possession of the field. Whether this would entitle him to claim the victory might - provoke another correspondence of equal length. The Irish Times, which on one occasion had even been forced to omit its classified advertisements in order to accommodate the contestants, has now reprinted the letters, or most of them, in pamphlet form. The interest of the pamphlet to an Englishman would be in the nature of the ground upon which the actions are fought He might be pardoned if he took the pamphlet to be an elaborate hoax, perpetrated by one of those individuals, common enough in Ireland, who like to write outrageous letters to the newspapers over one pseudonym, and answer them over another. The report of Father 0 Briain's speech sets the pace ; he is described at telling his audience that- " one of the fields oNfreedom in which Socialists agreed with Liberals was a free morality—the ethics of free love . . Sexual freedom would entail, as a necessary consequence, artificial prevention of births. As this was not infallible, there must also be freedom of abortion, divorce, and the State education of children who, in the new free society, were an obstacle to the pleasures and fun of the parents. Enlightened Liberals and Socialists were claiming all these liberties."
Father 0 Briain's opponents, need it be said, made the mistake of accepting battle on the ground he had chosen. Subsequently the discussion ranged far afield, covering, in addition to Liberal morality, the perennial problems of the censorship, and of the relationship of Church and State. But though all these are subjects that a citizen of any nation might expect to find presented to him upon his breakfast-table, where else—as the Irish are so fond of asking each other—but in Ireland, would they have been found in the form they took in the Irish Times? In what other country could a Professor of Philosophy, in a letter to a newspaper, say: " No genuine Liberal or Socialist will even accept the concept of sin : and so their claims to man's right to free love, contraception, abortion, divorce, homo-sexuality, etc., are merely the inescapable consequences of their basic teaching " ?
The escape hatch, of course, is through the word " genuine." Those English who were misguided enough to vote for either of the two parties named in the last general election, and who would nevertheless object to being identified with such extensive amorality, can console themselves that they are no better than deluded deviationists from genuine Liberalism and Socialism as expounded—according to Father 0 Briain—by Marx, Engels, Zola, Gide, Proust, Maurois, Blum, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley and Dorothy Thurtle. " Hell," as one of the correspondents put it, " for company."
On the censorship . . but that subject has grown tedious.
Suffice to say that the discussion on " the Liberal ethic " sprang from the Censorship Board's decision to ban the report of the British Royal Commission on PopUlation. They had already banned a novel by an Irish writer which had been made Catholic Book of the Month in America ; they have since banned another that has been made Catholic Book of the Month in Holland ; but in their decision to ban the Report of a Government Commission they excelled themselves. In " The Liberal Ethic " a correspondent attempts to prove, with some authority, that the censors would have been in danger of arrest and, presumably, imprisonment for con- tempt, if they had not banned the report. Since he wrote, they have banned Apuleius.
The third strand of the controversy would be still more likely to convince the Englishman that he was far from home. Article 44 of the Irish Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of conscience, " recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church." The Constitution won unstinted praise from Rome: but it does not satisfy domestic pietists, who like to be, as one correspondent described them, more Papal than the Pope. They have founded an organisation, called Maria Duce, with the object of revising article 44, on the lines indicated by the organisa- tion's secretary in his letter to the Irish Times:-
" For a'Catholic, religion is a matter of dogmatic certitude. For him, there is only one true religion. In consequence, all non-Catholic sects, as such, are false and evil, irrevocably so . . . Toleration for a Catholic always implies that what is tolerated is an evil, and that the toleration of this evil is itself justified only when such toleration is necessary to avoid a greater evil—that is, It is justified by the application of the principle of the double effect."
The double effect of the letter was to make both Catholics and Protestants begin to wonder if they were seeing things. It could only happen, they told each other again, in Ireland.
Perhaps it is unwise to base too much on a newspaper contro- versy ; perhaps those who seek to tow Ireland out into the Atlantic are noisy but ineffectual. " The Liberal Ethic " is, nevertheless, symptomatic of that change in Ireland's psychological climate which Mr. Harold Nicolson recently found reflected in the changed features of the inhabitants. The change is inevitable and, for the most part, desirable. What is really surprising is that the extremes have not thrown up a moronic margin comparable to that which used to disfigure Irish life. Anybody tempted to take " the Liberal Ethic " too seriously would do well to remember that not more than a century ago a Dublin newspaper—an ordinary commercial journal—could express its aims as a desire to " make it as clear as the noonday, out of Scripture, to every individual, Roman Catholic or Protestant, who shall read it, that Popery is the Babylon of God's Wrath—ipsissima abominatia—the veriest abomination."
Compared to past polemics, the pronouticements of Maria Duce are agreeably tame.
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