Authors: Declan Kiberd
In the decades following the 1960s, the Catholic church implemented much of the
aggiornamento.
The censorship of books and films was relaxed, often with the support of the more intellectual priests and nuns. Although individual bishops were still capable of giving errant politicians "the belt of a crozier", most religious debates were internal to the Catholic church, which was confronted with a catastrophic fall in vocations to the religious life. That church retained its controlling interest in most secondary schools, but fewer and fewer priests and nuns could be spared for teaching work: meanwhile, the new community schools, staffed by lay personnel, continued to multiply The encyclical of
Pope Paul VI outlawing contraception in 1968 generated much acrimonious debate, but it soon became clear that a new
à la carte
Catholicism was being practised: between 1960 and 1990 the size of the average Irish family was cut by half from 4.6 to 2.3 children.
Sexual behaviour, within and outside marriage, became markedly more liberal; and many rights denied to women – such as the right to work in the civil service after marriage – were restored. The special position of the
Catholic church in de Valera's constitution was removed by popular consent in 1972, by the self-same electorate which sent Ireland enthusiastically into the EEC. One of the leaders of Catholic opinion,
Jeremiah Newman, argued that adaptation to the new reality of life in an industrialized Europe would test Irish mettle to the end of the century. For Newman (who would prove to be a highly traditionalist bishop of Limerick) the question was "how to construct a new culture in a new context, a culture that will at once be new and relevant in that context and at the same time preserve the best of the old. It means a culture that will be considerably industrial yet without losing what is of lasting value in our rural social fabric. . . It means a culture that will be considerably
secular yet without losing our religious persuasions".
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His conclusion was that religion would be more and more a private election rather than a matter of social decorum. The logical inference was that this might produce a more thoughtful sort of Catholic, but that there would be fewer practising. Henceforth, those who went into the religious life would choose it in a most deliberate and conscientious way, rather than seeking social prestige or career opportunity.
One result was that throughout the 1970s and 1980s many Catholic priests and nuns spoke increasingly of their "option for the poor". Some adopted
radical positions on social questions concerning
travellers, the unemployed, or the rights of children. Many others went to the mission fields of the "developing" world, where they made their own comparisons with the situation in their home country: a significant number returned with new ideas about the democratization of parish life or the need for clergy to enter the regular workforce rather than live as a group apart. These persons, a force for renewal, became a thorn in the side of many a cautious bishop. The spectacle of nuns being jostled by policemen outside the American embassy or of priests being arrested on demonstrations became commonplace.
When the US President
Ronald Reagan visited Ireland in 1984, the public response was lukewarm in contrast to that accorded Kennedy, despite the visitor's sentiment that he was "coming home" to the family seat at Ballyporeen. This was largely due to the caustic commentaries on US foreign policy by radical priests and nuns, some of whom had been abused or even imprisoned by CIA-sponsored dictatorships in the Third World. The huge outpouring of support for Irish singer
Bob Geldof's Live-Aid musicals for the relief of famine in Africa owed something to folk memories of the Great Hunger, but much also to the campaigns of returned
missionaries. Confronted with awful poverty in debt-ridden states, many Irish volunteers reexamined their own motives, preferring to promote social
change in these societies rather than seeking religious conversions. A nation whose missionaries had gone forth to teach the poor of the developing world now found many returning with the news that the "Third World" had much to teach them.
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The
"liberation theology" pioneered in Latin America was a major factor, prompting much talk of two churches (an eccle-siocracy of empurpled prelates versus a people's devotional church), though the case should not be overstated, since many priests and nuns remained conservative while some bishops were social radicals.
The response of the institutional church to the loosening of its teaching authority was a call for charismatic renewal which came to a climax in 1979 with the visit of
Pope John Paul II. He preached against the IRA, abortion, divorce and contraception: and, before one million souls in the
Phoenix Park, he called on the faithful to remain loyal to their creed in face of secularist attack. The right of married couples to use contraceptives as an aspect of family planning had been upheld by the
Supreme Court in 1973: now the focus shifted elsewhere, as strict Catholics demanded that the legal ban on abortion be written into the constitution by special referendum, something which was done after a bitterly acrimonious debate in 1983. The majority Fianna Fáil party was still not ready for a full-scale confrontation with the church in order to separate its domain from that of the state.
Three years later in 1986 the Fine Gael/Labour coalition, led by the social democrat
Garret FitzGerald, attempted by referendum to rescind the ban on divorce. The conservatives won again: women, in particular, were said to have been frightened at the implications for property and inheritance in a society of limited means where divorce might easily be available. Foreign correspondents who watched a small majority for divorce turn into a modest majority against it remained unclear as to whether Catholic theory or pragmatic considerations explained the result. In the following decade, Fianna Fáil (now in coalition government with Labour) would confront the clergy on a range of issues, from control of schools to the running of hospitals: when in 1993 they decriminalized homosexuality in a vote of parliament, there was so little dissent that many felt sure that a reform of the law against divorce would not be far off.
What had not been resolved, however, was the question: what kind of society was to replace the pious, mainly rural and Catholic community of an earlier period? Successive government leaders, though they talked glibly of pluralism, never defined it with any clarity. To many it seemed no more than a buzz-word for administrative convenience: if the Catholic ethos of many hospitals seemed under threat, so did the Protestant ethos of still
others, both in danger of making way for a soulless, characterless health-service whose governing principle was a value-free efficiency.
Similar debates were conducted on educational reform. That "Catholic ethos" which had pervaded schools for two centuries had never been clearly defined, largely because it was assumed to be unproblematic and all-pervasive. What was to take its place was not at all obvious. Traditional constraints of Catholicism had been set aside by the post-1960s generation: by the early 1990s many church congregations in Dublin were dominated by persons over forty years of age, and that in a city with a markedly youthful demography. The old pieties had been absolutist: in the vacuum left after their breakdown, it became obvious that exponents of the "liberal agenda" had no alternative philosophy beyond vague nostra about "growth" and "GNP". Even in the discipline of economics, some intrepid commentators began to ask the politicians whether they were running a country or just an economy. In the philosophical vacuum, it was all too easy for a "cowboy" ethic to flourish, often to the strains of country-and-westem music.
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To some critics it seemed that the Irish, a most sociable and friendly people, still had not managed to create a truly civil society.
Many people – probably a clear majority – were better fed, educated, housed and cared for than ever before: yet by the 1990s three hundred thousand were unemployed and one in every three lived below the official poverty line. For them the loss of the old coherent codes would prove especially traumatic, for they had few material comforts to make the new spiritual emptiness bearable. This, along with the lack of employment opportunities, high taxation and the burgeoning debt crisis, may have prompted many young people to decide that there was no future for them in the country. Emigration, which had halted during a brief period of affluence in the 1970s, began again to assume chronic proportions, with up to 40,000 leaving in some years. Entire villages in the west of Ireland now had few, if any, inhabitants in their twenties and thirties. Instead, in the absence of that middle generation, the very old began to retreat into a world of nostalgic fantasy, while the very young succumbed often to a rather mindless hedonism. Yet, for all that, the conviction remained that it was from the younger generation that answers must finally come. When many of the more recent emigrants began to return in the 1990s from countries where recessions left alternative employment hard to find there was a perverse kind of hope that their experiences and energy might have given this generation the impetus to change life at home for the better.
What made such transformation problematic was the obdurate, unyielding nature of the problem of Northern Ireland a state which seemed unreformable from within or without. To the modernizing élites in the
republic, as to public opinion overseas, the opposition of northern unionists to the ecumenical spirit of the 1960s had seemed the worst form of traditionalism. "We are now approaching Aldergrove Airport, Belfast", went a comedians' joke in Dublin: "Please put your watches back three hundred years". Though the immediate portents from the Lemass-O'Neill meetings of 1964 had been good a more ominous response came from the unionist community, one third of whose members pronounced themselves opposed to any renewed contacts with the Dublin government.
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When a younger, more self-confident generation of nationalists initiated the
Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in 1967, modelled on
Martin Luther King's non-violent movement in the US, the unionist answer was to baton the marchers off the streets. A mildly reformist set of proposals to eliminate discrimination against Catholics in housing, local government and the franchise, led to the toppling of Terence O'Neill from the prime ministry; and by 1969 the British Army had been drafted into
Northern Ireland initially to protect Catholic homes from Protestant gangs.
At the time, a wag wrote tauntingly on a Belfast wall: "IRA = Irish Ran Away". By 1971, however, the same IRA was doing a roaring business, training recruits in the wake of internment without trial. In January of the following year, thirteen unarmed civil rights marchers were shot dead by British paratroopers in Derry on "Bloody Sunday"; and later that year, the IRA killed eleven with bombs in public places on "Bloody Friday". The death-toll began to mount fast. Against this lurid backdrop, the accession of the Republic to the European
Economic Community or the ending of compulsory Irish in its schools, seemed events from a different order of reality. To some northern nationalists they must have seemed like further confirmation that the south would betray them and the traditional insignia of national sovereignty To many southerners, the north seemed a Neanderthal place, caught in a historical time-warp, inhabited by paranoiacs who couldn't trust one another, much less the outside world. The south liked to think of itself as superior, affluent, urbane and forward-looking; the north, according to such thinking, was trapped in a woeful, repetitive past. Although Taoiseach
Jack Lynch in the earliest phase of the "Troubles" moved troops nearer to the border and made rhetorical references to the defence of "our people", the longer-term view was that northern nationalists were not really "our people" at all. In theory, of course, this was because such a phrase in good republican parlance should apply to all in the north, separated unionist brethren as well as nationalists; in practice, it was because many southerners had long despaired of accommodating either northern side and simply called down a plague on both houses.
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The citizens of the republic had been enjoying a rare period of affluence
when Northern Ireland erupted into violence: they feared that the spill-over of such disorder into the south could only threaten their new material well-being. That well-being was, by any previous standard, spectacular. In the 1960s alone the standard of living had doubled. Between 1962 and 1982 Irish industrial growth was the fastest in Europe (admittedly, the baseline from which it started was low, but this only added to the sense of momentum gained). So there was no serious solidarity with the Catholics across the border: in the new, emerging Ireland religion was to be a private affair. Hence, when Jack Lynch dismissed two senior government ministers on suspicion of gun-running (at a time when some people felt that northern Catholics needed arms in the face of a loyalist community armed to its teeth), it soon became clear that there was more support for than opposition to the Taoiseach's hands-off policy. The general attitude to the North in the republic was not unlike the approach to the Irish language: make us pure, Lord, but not quite yet (and certainly not if such purity entails financial or intellectual sacrifice).
In 1972 the political scientist
Richard Rose pronounced the Northern Ireland problem intractable: it was one of the few trouble-spots on earth, he said for which there was no imaginable solution.
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What followed bore that assessment out: at some point or another almost every remedy has been tried – every one, that is, except a British withdrawal. 1972 was also the year which saw the old regime at Stormont prorogued in favour of direct rule from London: in the following year a power-sharing executive, involving both unionist politicians and the nationalist
Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) was set up to fill a political vacuum which had been exploited by terrorists of all sides. It was brought down, however, in 1974 by a loyalist workers' strike, which the British Labour government failed to confront. That same year, over thirty people were killed in the republic by UVF bombs planted, in Dublin and Monaghan, with the alleged collusion of British operatives. If the objective was to panic the coalition government into ever more draconian legislation, it succeeded: at one point in the mid-1970s the government had rebel songs banned from Irish national airwaves; and it opened a file on the editor of
The Irish Press
(who had been incautious enough to publish letters from republicans critical of the new censorship).