Upon the Irish shore

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

I firmly resolved some weeks ago to make no comments on the American election. So I turn once again to the more stable political life of Ireland: In a vehement passage in his World Crisis, Sir Winston recalled that, after the terri- fic upheavals of the First World War, as the tidal waters began to recede, the fate of obscure parishes in Tyrone and Fermanagh was again on the agenda of British politics. It still is.

There are some very odd communications from indignant Irishmen. For example, in the Church Times of 1 November 1968, the asser- tion by the Reverend H. A. Weedon, of Castle- derg, Co Tyrone, that Protestant businessmen in Ulster often employ nobody but RCS. This is news to me, and certainly suggests a defiance of the advice of Lord Brookeborough to employ no Papishes. The reverend gentleman also as- serts that 'where gerrymandering exists it is pro- tecting RCS from the bigotry of their leaders.' This kindly paternal attitude explains a great deal of the bad temper of •the Papish inhabitants

_ of Ulster.

But there is another side to the controversies. I think Captain O'Neill scored a real hit on Mr Lynch when the latter tried (as a result of a con- ditioned reflex?) to explain recent troubles en- tirely in terms of partition. This led Captain O'Neill to retort that such an attitude didn't come well from the head of a government whose proposal to abolish proportional representation in the Republic had been overwhelmingly de- feated by the citizens of that state. Obviously they don't trust the ruling party which might otherwise have dug itself in as the Unionist or Orange Party has done in Ulster for over forty years now.

I speculate whether Mr Lynch has devoted any thought to the abolition of partition or to the reasons why partition has a certain kind of raison d'etre. The Catholics of the Republic have a memory of religious oppression which now distorts their view as to what religious liberty is. Without going into the history of the Penal Laws, the grievances of the Catholics were very serious and had to be skated over by such unequivocal leaders of the Enlightenment as Voltaire and to be denounced by Samuel John- son (he did not use the title 'Doctor,' pace Mr Alan Brien). One of the grievances which the Catholics suffered from was their total exclusion from any profitable public employment. So when some foolish controversialist told Sydney Smith that Catholics had no grievances, after the modification of the Penal Laws in the late eighteenth century, except that they were ex- cluded from government jobs, that intelligent Whig pointed out that there could hardly be any greater grievance than to be excluded from these jobs—for jobs meant jobs involving large salar- ies and few or no duties.

Consequently Catholics of the Irish Republic tended, and I think still do, to think of religious freedom in rather specialised terms. For example, the small Protestant minority in the Irish Republic is, from this point of view, ex- tremely well treated. A great deal of money is spent in providing Protestant education for its children, and it has been allowed to keep Christ Church and St Patrick's Cathedrals although most of the inhabitants of Dublin whose ancestors had anything to do with the erection of those buildings are Catholics. No such generosity was shown by the resurgent nationalist states of Europe!

In the same way, it would be inconceivable to have a situation such as exists in Ulster where every member of the cabinet must be a mem- ber of the Orange Order. I do not know whether all Unionist MPS have to be members of the Orange Order; but there are always one or two Protestants in the Irish Republican government and there have been some ostentatious acts of Catholic 'toleration' such as electing Douglas Hyde as the first President of Ireland. (Charac- teristically in that very unecumenical time, many Catholic admirers of the founder of the Gaelic League, among them Mr de Valera, could not go to his funeral service in St Patrick's Cathedral as this was a breach of the strict segregation of the Churches, then imposed in Ireland perhaps more rigorously than anywhere else in the Catholic world.

But there is another side of the medal which Irish Catholics of the Republic tend to ignore. I do not think the Irish read very much, and consequently I don't think that the Censorship Board interests a very large_proportion of the citizens of the Republic. But the fact that there is a Censorship Board is a defiance of the Pro- testant doctrine of private judgment. Knowing America well, especially the South, I know how bogus this Protestant regard for private judgment often is. Nevertheless, it is a Protes- tant doctrine, and the Censorship Board insults it.

I read recently that only novels are censored, but this I believe to be untrue. Thus Bernard Shaw's Black Girl was banned, not because it was fiction, but because it was heretical or, if you like, blasphemous. If my memory serves me rightly, a book by the late Dr Halliday Sutherland attacking birth control was banned, the reason being that you musn't mention that odious practice at all, the Catholic clergy pos- sibly thinking that if nothing was said about it, nobody in the Republic would hear about it. This, of course, suggested a sancta shnplicitas which surprises me, for at any time there are a million Irish Catholics living in England, going

to and fro, and bringing the news of birth con- trol to Ireland. Silence was impossible, denun- ciation was dangerous.

Now, thanks to the Pope, the question has been very much debated in the Republic, and Irish bishops have got to find some way of answering other than by the simple exercise of authority. That the Irish bishops have such power, or are believed to have such power, an- noys a great many Protestants, and it annoys a great many more Catholics than are willing to go on record. Again, to recall George A. Bir- mingham, Ireland is the only country in which

bishops' charges, pastorals, etc, are read. Whether this is still true or not I do not know, but certainly Irish Catholic bishops are re- markably fluent in addressing their audience.

What the Irish Republic will have to do if (this is not a very serious project anyway) it wishes to build up a Protestant party in Ulster which could even consider the ending of partition, is to encourage open anticlericalism.

Perhaps the test will come over the character of the new University of Dublin. I am in favour of the unifying of Trinity College and Univer- sity College since I think Ireland has at least as many universities as it can afford or needs, and it does not need two in Dublin. But certainly a Fellow of Trinity College may be slightly apprehensive if the new governing body of the Univeisity of Dublin is too much under the influence, or is believed to be too much under the influence, of the Catholic bishops. It was a very learned Catholic Irishman who once told me, 'You cannot have a good university in a Catholic country.' This is, I believe, untrue, but certainly the future freedom of the new Univer- sity of Dublin will be an acid _test, to quote that Ulsterman by ancestry, Woodrow Wilson. In the same way, the educational system of the Republic should have its high content of clerical control very seriously cut down, if it cannot be abolished. This will leave a good many problems both in the Republic and in Ulster if a really unified system of school educa- tion is adopted. The problem is a great deal more complicated than the innocent Mr John Grigg thinks. But the Catholic bishops of Nor- thern Ireland might look at Scotland to see how a kind of solution has been provided which cuts down or abolishes clerical control, while not begging the question of what is to be done with schools in the simple English way of Mr Grigg's imagination.

One last point. All outside commentators on Ireland (and I am one) should remember that,

North and South, Irishmen are given to exces- sive rhetoric. Despite the Scottish ancestry of many of the inhabitants of Ulster, they behave.

as visiting Scots from Francis Jeffrey on have said, extremely like mere Irishmen; and a won- derful example of this is provided by Mr Chichester-Clark, MP, a kinsman of Captain O'Neill. Attacking Mr Fitt for provoking the driving of the Royal Ulster Constabulary into defending themselves rather violently, he has announced that 'if I had on my conscience what he should have had on his, I would find it very hard to live:' This brought back to my memory the late George Orwell's comment on the moral dilemma of Scobie, the hero of Mr Graham Greene's Heart of the Matter. Orwell suggested that a man with such a delicate conscience should not have entered the colonial police to begin with, and I am very surprised that Mr Chichester-Clark has managed to survive in active Ulster politics for so long without com- mitting suicide. However, it is all Irish rhetoric, mixed up with what Shaw used to call 'bland- andhering.'