Ireland without Rome?

Stan Gebler Davies

The question whether Ireland would be better off with or without the Church of Rome has exercised the island for the last several centuries, with civilised opinion and successive administrations, colonial, ascendancy imperial, Free State and Re- publican, all coming to the conclusion that the Church is, on the whole, and taking everything into account, a plus rather than a minus. Imagine the consternation of the lot of us when this same august institution, on which we all must depend to keep us on the straight and narrow path between right and wrong, suffers, in the course of two days, two crippling blows from which it is unlikely to recover.

The first of these was inflicted by the state, but the more disabling, as is the way with these things, by the Church itself. The state, as represented by our genial, un- popular Prime Minister, Garret Fitzgerald, rammed through the Dail Eireann a mea- sure making it legal for unmarried adoles- cents to buy rubber prophylactics for the ,purpose of indulging in sexual intercourse without the attendant risks of contagion and propagation.

The second blow, which must ultimately prove fatal, was the abolition of the confes- sion box for children. Persons described as diocesan educational advisers have been allowed to prescribe a new sacrament of penance in Dublin which will remove entirely that necessary element of the fear of God and His priests which is all that has kept the Irish, otherwise a notably licen- tious race, from wholesale abandonment.

Under the new rite of confession a child will, until an advanced .age, be allowed communal, public confession in the pre-

sence of parents instead of the dark solitary and terrifying gloom of the box. Lest there be any lingering doubt in the mind of the child that the whole business is all a sham or that he, or she, need for a moment fear the wrath of God for any transgression, these words shall be spoken by the priest:

We show God Our Father that we love Him when we pray to Him and thank Him. We don't show love when we don't pray to God Our Father. Did you let days go by when you didn't pray to God Our Father? We don't show love when we say 'No' to Mammy and Daddy when they ask us to do something. Did you say 'No' when your Mammy or Daddy asked you to do something? (A moment's silence is observed here by the priest.) We show others that we love them when we give them some of our sweets and let them play with our toys. We don't love others when we take things that don't belong to us and keep them for ourselves.

It must be said in defence of Dr McNa- mara, Archbishop of Dublin and in many ways an admirably reactionary man, that he has insisted that children must at least once enter the confessional before they are allowed Holy Communion, but it is plain that this rearguard action of his must be a failure and that the new style of confession will be firmly entrenched in the Irish Catholic Church.

The Health (Family Planning) (Amend- ment) Bill, to Dr McNamara's dismay, squeaked through the Dail by a margin of 83 votes to 80 after an extraordinarily passionate debate which surely demons- trated once and for all that if there is anything the Irish care about it is, above all, sex. Mr Desmond O'Malley, who had the misfortune to be a liberal member of

Mr Haughey's party, Fianna Fail, speaking for the Bill, pointed out that it was already possible to buy rubbers at Dublin Univer- sity along with the rest of one's groceries, and the Bill would make it more, rather than less, difficult to get hold of the things.

Mr O'Malley, who had already had the whip withdrawn from him for making sensible noises about the North, was, for making this speech, expelled altogether from his party. Five members of the Government coalition parties forfeited the whip for voting on the other side. There was standing room only in the visitors' galleries and the audience, above and below, was reduced continually to howls of merriment.

Mrs Mary Flaherty, for the Govern- ment, said that moral standards (by which she meant publicly expressed hostility to the practice of fornication) were higher in Northern Ireland than in the Republic, and when John O'Leary, for the Opposition, announced that he had it on the best of medical advice that condoms were only 70 per cent safe and that teenagers would be using them without knowing how to use them, the House blew up entirely.

This is not surprising. Chastity is, and always has been, in Ireland, a joking matter, the best part of the joke being that the Irish have managed to maintain, ever since Giraldus Cambrensis unsuccessfully blew the whistle on them, an entirely spurious reputation for it. 'There are no more innocent girls in the world than the Irish,' wrote Thackeray in 1843, but he was in love with one of them and had not noticed she had gone mad until she threw herself off a paddle-steamer halfway to Cork.

A nation which exports its young men and women, as Ireland always has done,

must necessarily cultivate the notion that they are at least chaste, but the notion that chastity is, or ever was, a particularly Irish virtue is a grotesque nonsense which will easily and immediately be discovered by any visitor to the place (unless his wife has fallen off the boat on the way across) so soon as he opens his ears to the conversa- tion of the people: a little of it is about politics and most of it is about sport but a lot of it is about copulating.

I have to admit to a certain bias on this score. I have always found the women of Ireland to be a degree more gracious and indeed physically beautiful than any others and I have noticed that those of them who are married are peculiarly prone to civil attention, if only because they get little of it from their husbands. I have never been of the opinion that fornication is quite the most terrible sin and for my refusal to recant on this question am myself denied the sacraments. if Ireland has given up the pretence to chastity I shall not mourn it.

If Ireland has given up her Church, that is another matter. The Church Of Ireland and the Church of England have both destroyed themselves. It would be a terri- ble thing for Ireland if the Church of Rome did likewise.