It struck me some time last night that perhaps I had jumped the gun in the order of speakers, because I came in directly after Senator Connaughton of Fine Gael. If I prevented any Fianna Fáil speaker from eagerly making his or her contribution, I do apologise.
I was reviewing the debate so far, one intriguing aspect of which I found to be that a number of speakers either liked the Bill, but proposed to vote against it, or did not like the Bill, but proposed to vote for it. I was referring to my predecessor in the debate, Senator Connaughton, whose remarks brought up the question of whether the couples who will have access to contraceptives under this Bill will be married or unmarried. I pointed out simply for the record that there is no reference whatsoever in the Bill to married couples.
I praise Senator Alexis FitzGerald and Senator Mary Robinson for their contributions and I particularly approved of Senator FitzGerald's observation that the Bill discriminates in favour of a particular ethos. I listened with interest to Senator Honan's contribution. It appears that she looked into her own heart and, without any benefit of celestial communication, divined that the Chief would have approved of this Bill. I somehow think that he himself would have favoured external association as the more preferable method.
Senator Yeats observed that family planning is not a matter for the State, but yet he proposes to vote for a Bill which says otherwise. He pointed out that no Bill is acceptable to everyone and the Minister has to find some middle ground. This raises one of the most fundamental points about the process the Minister followed in arriving at the present form of the Bill. Is it not a fact that government is a delegation of authority from the people, and that a government once elected have a mandate to govern? After the European election debacle, the Fianna Fáil people were quick to remind us that this did not make a difference to their mandate to govern. Should not a mandate to govern involve governmental and ministerial decision involving courage and vision and foresight, and to hell with the consequences? If the Minister for Health wanted to bring in a Bill in which he believed, why did he not do that, either resign from the Government, or opt out of the whole situation? It seems to me that the wrong way to handle either the economy or a matter like this is to abdicate this kind of fundamental responsibility of a government to govern. Senator Yeats also made the very acceptable point that one should not play party politics, or that it is a pity that this issue has become one of party politics. I would suggest—perhaps it is a very comfortable position for an independent to be in —that this is the fault of all parties. They have all played politics with family planning and presented us from time to time with such pathetic spectacles as a Taoiseach voting against a Bill introduced by his own Minister for Justice and, at present, a Government Minister, in effect, challenging and defying the party Whip and getting away with it. Of course, there should have long since been an all-party approach to this matter. It seems to me that, instead of going out into the highways and by-ways, and consulting every Tom, Dick, and Harry, the Government should have consulted Parliament itself, and that there should have been an all-party consultative committee on this matter.
Senator Lambert, in a very thoughtful contribution, reminded us of another essential point, that availability of contraceptives is not compulsion. There is no compulsory contraception. He had some praise for the family planning clinics, which I heartily endorse and, yet, though the tenor of his speech was against the Bill, he finished up by telling us that he will vote for it. That is his personal decision and I respect it.
Senator Harte elicited from the Minister a comment about the role of the doctor in which the Minister assured us that doctors would act reasonably in these matters. I take that to mean that a doctor will automatically endorse a married couple's application for access to contraceptives, but there is nothing in the Bill which says that the doctor shall so automatically endorse that application. It will be entirely at his discretion, and we all know there are doctors throughout the countryside who are very conservative people indeed, who may be activists in Catholic lay organisations, and there is no guarantee whatsoever that doctors will act reasonably in this matter.
Senator Whitaker reminded us that we live in a pluralist society, a fact which the Bill ignores, and Senator Whitaker also finds the idea of a doctor's intrusion in a private area distasteful. Senator Molony raised the question of the role of the legislator in these matters. Are we there to reflect existing attitudes, or are we there, or are the Government there, to direct and positively encourage people towards more constructive attitudes? My own view is that if government means anything it means leadership, and if people have views which are restrictive, if they are conditioned to have these restrictive views, then it is the business of government to counter that conditioning.
Senator Molony also made a very interesting remark when he said that, if the family clinics had not been attended with so much publicity, they might have done better, that if they had conducted their business in an unobtrusive fashion, perhaps there would not be all this trouble.
This brings us to another very important question. Why should the family planning clinics conduct their business in an unobtrusive fashion? This is rather like the Minister's own statement introducing the Bill in the other House, when he said that the possibility of manufacturing contraceptives arose but he did not think it likely or desirable that there would be an Irish industry, so to speak, in this area. I am quoting from memory.
Again, underlying Senator Molony's comment about unobtrusiveness and underlying the Minister's comment about the undesirability of an Irish manufacturing contraceptive industry, there is the old sneaky suggestion that all this is a dirty business, we do not talk about it, and you put it away in a corner. I entirely reject that view. There is no reason why we should not have a manufacturing industry in contraceptives. Guaranteed Irish, of course.
It was Senator Martin's contribution which I found of the greatest interest, and with which I disagreed most. I say of the greatest interest because, perhaps, he is a direct academic colleague, but more than that he and I are products of the same country culture and the same Catholic culture. We seem to have very different views on it. He referred to the Bill and the whole business of debating contraception as ignoble, dreary and embarrassing. I disagree strongly with that point of view. Does it indicate the scars of his Catholic boyhood that he finds these matters distasteful? It may well be that the subject is boring by now. A number of young and youngish married couples have said to me that they find the whole thing extremely boring at this stage. They regard this Bill as an irrelevance to what they have been doing and what they propose to continue to do. It may be that they are in for a very rude awakening indeed.
Senator Martin attributed to me the phrase and the concept of "middle Ireland", which is the idea that, out there there is a vast silent majority whose views are not the liberal ones which are to be heard in more rarefied circles and that account has to be taken of this "middle Ireland" point of view. We are at a very crucial point here. I take Senator Martin's point to be that "middle Ireland" has a firm conservative view on this whole matter, and that view is that not only would they not use artificial contraceptives themselves but they are totally against their availability to others. If that is the view of "middle Ireland" then it is a view which is inconsistent with the principles of civil and religious liberty and it should be countered by the Government.
It is a selective conditioning. "Middle Ireland" has not been conditioned to have tender consciences about all kinds of other issues, about social injustice, land speculation, sleazy mergers, the alienation of our natural resources, the glamourising in TV interviews of financial spivs. Why has "middle Ireland" not been conditioned to have a conscience about these matters? The fact is—and this raises the question of the free vote and conscientious objection—that through a particular quirk in our history "middle Ireland" has been brought up through several generations in a ferociously puritanical attitude to sex, and to all these matters we are talking about. I am absolutely in favour of everybody making his own choices in these matters, but it is every Government's duty to point out to "middle Ireland" the simple axiomatic democratic principle that they can exercise their own options but they have no right to restrict the choice of options of their fellow citizens.
Senator Martin used the phrase "common ground in the middle". Something similar was said by Senator Whitaker—"middle of the road"—and the Minister used a similar phrase in his introductory statement. All seem to suggest that this Bill is a middle-of-the-road Bill. I would support a middle-of-the road Bill but this Bill is well to the right of the middle of the road. I have some sympathy with the Minister in all this. It is a measure of my interest that I have gone frequently into the other House at different stages of the Bill. I have sympathy with him at the human level for having to stick out this kind of constant and scathing criticism from what opposition there was in the Dáil and the criticism I am sure he had to sustain before he brought it into the Dáil, at least from one hostile colleague in Government. My sympathy is far outweighed by my disagreement. I am astonished by his general attitude, which could be paraphrased thus: "Here is the best we can do. We have consulted all possible interests. This is a fait accompli presented to you gentlemen in Parliament. Why are you so unreasonable as to make it difficult for me to get it through?” That is not an unfair example of the Minister's attitude.
I regret that he, above all politicians in the Fianna Fáil Party, has sponsored a Bill which is arguably unconstitutional in terms of restrictions on human rights, probably unworkable in many respects, pusillanimous in approach and, most deplorable of all, denominational in inspiration. To take the point about consultation first, I really do not think the long process of consultation has really achieved anything in the end. I am sorry to say that, because the Minister has worked hard. If you set out to appease all possible interests, if you travel a piece of the road with everyone, you wind up nowhere. This again brings me back to my obvious point that it is the duty of governments to govern.
The Minister might say to me: how would you have approached the matter? What Bill would you have introduced? I enjoy the luxury of not having to do that. One option open to the Government was unrestricted availability, a simple repeal of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act. One has to accept that the climate of opinion is against this and it is not a realistic option. The young and the immature have to be protected from commercial exploitation, although I suspect there is a good deal of hypocrisy about our attitude on that as well. When we say, "You could not flood a country with contraceptives", what we really mean is we do not want to see them everywhere. Just keep them away. We do not want to see them when we go into the gentlemen's toilet. It is not proper. We often confuse a sense of primness, prudity, propriety with real moral values.
Accepting that there had to be some restrictions—although in parenthesis I may say I can envisage, even under the present Bill, lots of ways in which young people can get their hands on contraceptives—what were the other options? I would like to have seen the Minister turning his eyes northwards, to Northern Ireland, an area which we are so anxious to grapple to our bosom, not with hoops of steel, but with bands of love. Why could not Northern Ireland have been accepted as a model in its approach to this whole question? There you have a mixed community; you have a strong sense of family values. One thing we share with Northern Protestants is a sense of family tradition, residual parental discipline perhaps.
The position there, as far as I know, is that there is a combination of health boards, family planning clinics, free pharmaceutical outlets, and so on. There is no reason to believe that has affected the quality of life in terms of sexual morality in that area, or that the problems of protecting moral fibre in, let us say, Enniskillen, are any greater than they are in Monaghan town. There you find reasonable access and availability, and acceptance of contraceptives as a readily available option, and yet no one in his right mind could describe Northern Ireland as a sexually permissive society, or one that offends personal susceptibilities. In any case, it is doubtful if the availability of contraceptives in itself, the availability of mechanisms, actually creates a permissive and degenerate society. Yet that is the dubious assumption throughout this Bill.
Perhaps the Minister could have made use here in the Republic of various combinations of health boards, existing family planning clinics, the pharmacists, to ensure reasonable access and a maximum of supply outlets. Of course, there would be, and there will be, conscientious objectors in the health boards and in the pharmaceutical profession, but a combination of all of them, and the existing health clinics, I suggest, would have gone a long way towards overcoming the problem of conscientious objection. In short, this subject could have been approached by the Minister with courage and determination, and a refusal to be influenced by every possible lobby in the country. These qualities of courage and determination, as Senator FitzGerald pointed out, are sadly lacking in the Bill.
The Bill is probably unconstitutional, if in no other respect, in that it does not sufficiently observe the Supreme Court ruling that a married couple have the right to decide for themselves the ways and means to plan their family. I could also envisage a situation where a couple, perhaps in a remote area of the west or south west of Ireland, remote from centres of access to methods of family planning, might well plead that their geographical position was a matter of discrimination in itself. The Bill is unjust in terms of simple social justice, because there is no guarantee that medical card holders will have a fair crack of the whip in this matter. Doubtless if they have recourse to the usual hyprocrisy of pleading medical purposes they may be accommodated, but there is no guarantee that medical card holders will not continue to be at a disadvantage as against the well off, well educated and the well placed who will continue to have no family planning problems.
The Bill is arguably unworkable because, for one thing, the section on importation—the one that deals with control at customs—is absolutely hilarious, and that hilarity has been sufficiently exposed in the Dáil debates. There is another area which, I think, has not been mentioned so far in which the Bill promises to be unworkable, that is, the participation of the pharmacists. There has been much speculation about the extent to which the medical profession may or may not participate. We are overlooking the vital role which is assigned to the pharmacists in this Bill. We are overlooking the extent to which the co-operation of pharmacists may not be forthcoming.
The Irish Pharmaceutical Union conducted a poll among its own members at a stage when the draft Bill was known. The poll was conducted in very simple terms: "Are you willing to work this Bill from your point of view on the basis of the present draft Bill?" This questionnaire was circulated to 1,100 pharmacists which is, I understand, the number of retail pharmacists in the State. There were 400 positive replies—400 pharmacists said: "Yes, we will work this Bill on its present conditions and the way it is in draft". That represents 38 per cent. Only 28 per cent would have been willing to tolerate a free-for-all situation without legislation, but 38 per cent—or 400 out of 1,100 —is not a majority by any means and, in itself, suggests that there will be a great deal of unworkability in this area.
The questionnaire did not disclose where the 400 came from. There was not any geographical or regional breakdown, but I would say that it is a reasonable inference, in the nature of things, that the 400 out of the 1,100 pharmacists who were willing to cooperate would probably be in the big towns, and would do so through commercial incentives, through a more liberal frame of mind, and so on. If my hypothesis is correct it would mean that the other 700, who either did not reply or replied very strongly negatively, would probably coincide roughly with rural ireland, which would aggravate the problems I would anticipate in this area.
The picture has changed, however, as a result of the amendment introduced by the Minister into section 4, that is, the extension of section 4 (1) which provides for the presence at a family planning clinic of a pharmacist. It is my information that the attitude of the majority of the members of the Irish Pharmaceutical Union, whose co-operation to work this Bill was grudging in the first place, has now been put very much at risk by the extension of this clause. Pharmacists have objected all along—I am giving this as a matter of detached observation, and not taking up any attitude on this point—to the activities of family planning clinics. They claim that they are breaking the law on more than one ground and, of course, they are depriving pharmacists of revenue. The pharmacists envisage that, if this amendment stands, any clinics that may be licensed by the Minister will divert a profitable retail line which pharmacists consider should be their own business.
They further fear that if the Minister licenses such clinics and they have a resident pharmacist there that these clinics will then imperceptibly extend their activities from family planning into, let us say, wider gynaecological areas and, perhaps, who knows into still further areas beyond that. Pharmacists fear this extension of section 4 (1) (b) (i) and, at the time of going to press, that amendment may well put at risk the already halfhearted co-operation which is evident from the poll I quoted. The Irish Pharmaceutical Union chiefs managed to get a substantial minority to agree to work the Bill but it is doubtful if this any longer holds good in view of their objections to the new amendment.
I have gone into some detail on that point but I think it is an interesting detail. It illustrates how unworkable the Bill may be even in this respect. It is, however, the general philosophy of the Bill that I find repellent. There is nothing so tragi-comic as the spectacle of the State interfering in the area of private morality. Not only does it not work but it is farcical. It only succeeds in fostering a climate of contempt for law and developing a mentality of evasion. The classic case, of course, was prohibition in the United States. Without wanting to be facetious, there is much to be said for the view that the State should legislate against activity in this area, only that activity which, as they say in America, frightens the horses. Why, in any case, should the State introduce family planning legislation that discriminates in favour of a particular ethos, a point which was raised by Senator FitzGerald?
This Bill discriminates in favour of a code of sexual morality which is taught by the Church leaders of the prevailing denomination. The theory is that 95 per cent of the citizens give allegiance to that denomination and its ruling on sexual morality. If this is true, if there is a loyal 95 per cent Catholic community in the State, then an unrestricted slot machine contraceptive culture would present no dangers to that monolithic denominational community. Why are they worried about it? If the three million Catholics are all good Catholics what possible difference can legislation make to them? If they are disciplined, unshaken and mature in their adherence to the sexual code of the Church to which they profess to belong they really do not have to worry about it one way or the other. The truth is, of course, that there is nothing like this monolithic unity among the 95 per cent. There is a wide variety of attitudes on family planning among that 95 per cent. That being so, the State should have recognised a plurality of views even among the nominal 95 per cent and should have legislated accordingly. Of course, it cannot be repeated too often that no one will be compelled to use contraceptives. To borrow, perhaps, an inappropriate phrase from the days of the debate about compulsory Irish, nobody is going to have contraceptives forced down his throat.
The definitions or interpretations in section I do not, interestingly enough, include a definition of family planning itself. The Bill assumes a qualitative or moral difference between natural and artificial family planning. We all grew up in a climate where the only barely mentionable method was natural family planning. I am, I suppose, a product of natural family planning and so are my five children. From the days when I began to think for myself I could see very little sense in the moral distinction between natural and artificial family planning. This is crucial to the Bill because the Bill rests on a division of the natural family planners and the artificial family planners. Before I develop this crucial point let me remind the House that contrary to the received view the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church—this is more relevant to the Bill—to family planning is far from being unchangeable.
A different Pope might well have issued a different encyclical in 1968 and, as Senator Lambert suggested yesterday, it is not inconceivable that a future Synod of Bishops or a future Church Council might call, in view of the widespread dissent in many countries, for an agonising reappraisal of the whole position on family planning. However, that is in the future and is speculation but what is very much fact is the remarkable shift of emphasis in Roman Catholic teaching on family planning over, say, the last 20 years.
Many Senators will recall the old time Mission Week and the sex and brimstone sermons on Wednesday night or Thursday night. They will recall the way in which the term family planning, meaning the spacing of births, was thundered against from the pulpits. God will provide, we were told. That was the constant assurance and threat which they made in response to those people who would attempt to limit family size. The use of the safe period—that crude and unreliable precursor of much more sophisticated so-called natural methods today—was permitted only for grave medical or economic reasons. That was the constantly reiterated teaching of Pius XII, it was to be found in the kind of marriage manuals one bought in those days in Burns, Oates and Washbourne—they probably were not available in Dublin and Cork—and, certainly, it was the frequently enjoined counsel of one's confessor: one can use the safe period only for grave medical or economic reasons. Even then it carried the stigma of the less than perfect approach to the problem of Catholic couples faced with the phenomenon of human fertility. The perfect approach, the counsel of perfection, was absolute abstention or a joyful willingness to take the consequences of unremitting copulation.
That was the position when I got married. Now, the remarkable change has taken place in that Roman Catholic married couples who use the Billings method—a much more, whatever its defects, reliable method than the safe period, a refinement of the safe period—far from being stigmatised by their confessors and their Bishops as frail human vessels are hailed as absolute models of heroic sanctity. We forget all this but that represents a remarkable shift in Church attitudes towards family planning. One reason we forget it is that our Church leaders, particularly in Ireland, are marvels at the exercise of collective amnesia. It is a highly significant change. The reason I bring it up here is that in the context of people being troubled by conscience it is very important for those who have these consciences on this matter to remember that they are not dealing with a cardinal principle of immutable moral law.
I should like to return to the distinction the Bill makes, in accordance with Roman Catholic teaching, between natural and artificial family planning. It is in my view, a false distinction, a distinction that confuses the means with the end. The Bill does not define family planning as such so I may attempt my own definition which is, in fact, a euphenism. We all know that family planning is euphemism. It simply means the avoidance of pregnancy. All family planning is, in the last analysis, contraception and unnatural. Nature intends pregnancy; human beings circumvent it. The means they employ to do so, whether by thermometer, the calendar, mucus inspection, mechanical devices, spermicidal creams or an ovulant pill, seem to be immaterial. How can one describe as natural a strategem like the Billings method which depends for its efficacy on, and would not have come to light at all except for modern, sophisticated, knowledge of human biology? How can that be natural? How can it be natural to investigate the potentialities of fertility by using fertility drugs which can result in abnormalities? This is not condemned by Church authorities but it seems to me that it is interfering with nature in as obvious a way as any other.
If the Bill envisages further research into so-called natural family planning—here again the Bill faithfully reflects the desires of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy—will not the consequence of further refined research into the Billings method be in time a more accurate pin-pointing of fertile periods and so a much greater and more certain evasion and frustration of nature's reproductive intentions? Even if I have not convinced the Minister on this score, even if he still maintains that there is a vital moral distinction, that surely is a matter for the individual conscience, influenced or not by the moral teaching of particular Churches. Certainly, the distinction is none of the State's business, as Senator Yeats rightly said. Yet, everywhere throughout this Bill, the State insists on making this moral distinction which is none of its business. Every encouragement is to be given to those who believe only in natural family planning.
Under section 2 (b) the Minister shall provide a comprehensive natural family planning service. Anyone at all, under section 3 (2), may teach natural family planning methods. That subsection states:
A person other than a health board may make available a family planning service for the provision of information,
Anyone can teach the Billings method, even though there is widespread agreement that the efficacious use of the Billings method relies heavily on skill, motivation and sophistication in its practice. Yet anyone can be an instructor in this method. Section 9 states:
The Minister may, out of moneys provided by the Oireachtas, make a grant to a person to finance, or assist in the financing of, research into methods of family planning that do not relate to the use of contraceptives.
That section not alone reinforces the State's declared discrimination in favour of this form of contraception, it virtually guarantees the spending of taxpayers' money on promoting research into this area. Surely, if the State is to get involved at all in research in these matters it is important that it should not fall behind in other areas also.
The Minister in his speech stated:
Since the matter has been raised elsewhere, I think it well to make clear that the absence, in the section, of a reference to research into any other forms of contraceptives does not preclude assistance for this. The Minister for Health already has powers which would make it possible to assist, through the Medical Research Council or the Medico Social Research Board, research into other methods of contraception.
If that is so, why is a special position given in section 9 to research into natural family planning methods only? Why have not the Minister's powers in this matter been incorporated into this section? I suggest that section 9 should be amended simply by the deletion of the last five or six words and should read:
The Minister may make a grant to a person to finance research into methods of family planning
Only by such amendment can this continuous discrimination be removed.
Those citizens who do not adhere to an exclusive belief in natural family planning are discriminated against in this Bill. Such law-abiding taxpaying citizens who, for one reason or another, do not exclusively adhere to natural family planning methods are to be supervised and monitored by the doctors and pharmacists. They must pay prescriptive and dispensing fees for non-medical contraceptives, may be subjected to harassment by customs officials. And they are stigmatized in the Bill as rather seedy dissidents whose activities may be barely tolerated under extremely restrictive conditions. I object to this outrageous discrimination by the State against citizens who are entitled to the utmost privacy and non-interference in what or what not they propose to do about their own sexual affairs.
The involvement of medical practitioners in the matter of access to non-medical contraceptives is a blatant interference with the constitutional rights of citizens to make their own mature decisions. We should think about that concept of maturity. One of our great defects as a people, again for historical reasons not entirely due to clerical paternalism but for other reasons, has been immaturity. People should make their own mature decisions on these matters without rushing off to the family doctor.
Why should doctors take on the role of moral arbiters? What are they doing in this area? There is this characteristically Irish deference also to the family physician as if he, by virtue of his calling, had some superior reservoir of wisdom about all matters. Again, that is a form of immaturity. What are the doctors doing in this non-medical area? Even when it comes to medical areas how many of them are trained in family planning, still less in moral theology? Is it not a ludicrous and pathetic picture if we take, for example, a married couple in their late thirties deciding that two, three or four or more children are enough, being compelled to put their entirely non-medical decision for approval before a young GP barely out of medical school? Is it envisaged that medical practitioners in their role as citizens seeking advice, will have to go to some Solomon among their colleagues? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
In recent years Irish Catholics have thankfully begun to move away from the paternalism so often associated with priest-people relations in the past. Is that clerical paternalism now to be replaced by GP paternalism? Is the young doctor to old presbyter writ new? Bernard Shaw, in the preface to John Bull's other Island, described the Irishman of his day as a child before his Church. Are the Irishman and Irishwoman now to transfer this moral childhood to the doctor-patient relationship?
I am not going to deal on Second Stage with the various nonsenses in section 4 (1) (b) (ii) though I have spent much time in speculation about what bona fide could possibly mean and wondering what is its implied opposite malo fide. The Minister intervened last night when Senator Harte was speaking to point out that the doctor may be expected to behave reasonably on this matter but I would say again the Bill permits him to say “no”. If his consent is automatic then why should people have to have recourse to him at all?
The Minister proposes to give this supervisory role to the doctor and it seems to me that this runs counter to the Minister's whole philosophy since he became Minister for Health. His occupation of office has been admirably characterised by a very successful propaganda campaign in which people have been exhorted to be responsible for themselves and for their own health in matters like smoking, alcohol and so on. People have been told, in effect, to act maturely, not to clog up the hospitals because of their own selfish inability to direct and be responsible for their own health, not to clog up the doctors' waiting rooms and to be mature in their approach. In this Bill we have the same Minister in effect providing that couples will clog up the doctors' waiting rooms entirely unnecessarily because in this matter they are not only unhealthy but are bursting with health and vigour and have no business there at all. The Minister's period of office is being characterised by this admirable insistence on the individual's responsibility for his own health and welfare but, suddenly in this Bill in the most intimate area of the person's life, he is told he cannot be trusted to deal with this himself, he is not mature enough and must have recourse to the doctor. That seems to be a flagrant contradiction.
I am not going to say much about the phrase in the Bill which provides for conscientious objection except that it seems to me that the whole thing hangs together. I am talking about a Taoiseach voting against his own Government Bill, a Minister defying the party Whip and getting away with it in the present instance, a conscientious objection clause permitting people to opt out of the Bill and the talk about a free vote. Where do we have this attitude in other areas of legislation? I suggest that this is not so much conscience as a selective conditioning of attitudes on one particular area in Irish Catholic life which it is the duty of progressive legislators to counter in every way they possibly can.
I now move to my most deep-rooted objection to this Bill. The Minister has described it in an already celebrated phrase as "an Irish solution to an Irish problem." I could not agree more that this is a very good description of this Bill. It carries all the hallmarks of that kind of Irishness which is the most unprepossessing of our natural characteristics which I do not propose to endorse in this present instance. I am talking about the tendency to say one thing and mean another, to pretend to be doing something while dodging the issue, the ostensible fulfilment of a promise to deal with a situation while, in fact, not facing up to the situation at all. It may well be threatening penalties which may never be enforced, turning the blind eye: "Sure we all know they do not mean it. We know where we can get them but mind you I said nothing". In this case "Irishness" means bringing in a pathetic legislative measure which will make no difference to the fortunate citizens who know where to go and who have never had any family problems because they can always get the service they want. The Bill does nothing for those who are in genuine and desperate need. It is, indeed, an Irish solution to an Irish problem.
That phrase has levels of meaning which doubtless the Minister did not intend because at another level the phrase, "an Irish solution to an Irish problem", can be fairly faithfully translated as, "an Irish Catholic solution to an Irish Catholic problem". The Roman Catholic Church is the only denomination in Ireland whose leaders totally and without reservation reject artificial contraceptives. Since this Bill reflects their views is it not a fair inference to describe the Bill as frankly denominational or confessional in its approach?
Interviewed on RTE radio on 14 May 1978, a leading member of the Irish Roman Catholic Hierarchy declared that "should legislation of the kind we are discussing now on family planning proceed in a particular direction the bishops would find it totally unacceptable". It is evident by now that the bishops find this Bill quite acceptable despite the diversionary noises off stage from conservative Catholic lay organisations. It is a tragedy that in 1979 at this juncture of modern Irish history we should be offered a denominational Bill from a Minister who is particularly well aware that a secular State is an integral part of Irish republicanism.
In recent times I have been trying to make the vital distinction between the tribe and the nation. The majority of Irish people belong to a particular tribe. I do not mean the word to be in any sense offensive but it is an accurate cultural and anthropological description. That is a part of what we are, a part of our heritage and not to be rejected. Let us cherish our particular allegiances and traditions. The nub of our tragedy in this island is that in the past we have persisted, and we still persist, in confusing the tribe with the nation, in confusing Irish with Catholic. The State's role in this part of Ireland, properly perceived, should be to help us transcend our tribal attitudes, disentangle that confusion between tribes and nation and help us create that nation which, despite lip service, does not yet exist.
Various appeals have been made by the Minister and some Senators to support this Bill on the ground it is the best we can do and to be reasonable about it. I am going to make an appeal across the floor through the Chair to the Fianna Fáil Senators: if they have not been totally lost to true republicanism—after all only a few weeks ago they were officially represented at the graveside of the father of that republicanism—if by republicanism they mean something wider and something more comprehensive than simply Catholic nationalism, then they should vote against this Bill. I could not in my conscience as an Irish man, go on record as voting for a measure which so blatantly legislates for the tribe and disregards the nation.
