I move:
That Seanad Éireann takes note of the report of the New Ireland Forum.
I am delighted to be able to propose this motion. I am also glad to see that there is an amendment from Senators Dooge and Ferris, the leaders of Fine Gael and Labour in this House, in that this shows their commitment to the idea of discussing this subject which I and Senator Ross had pressed so hard for at the end of the last session. As far as this amendment is concerned we are not about to start to try to raise a vote against it or anything of that sort. We can accept that the motion and the amendment exist basically as a framework for a discussion of the Report of the New Ireland Forum and its content. We can take it in that way. It is not a motion and amendment that we need to go into every detail of the wording.
I would also like to welcome, and thank the Leader of the House and the Whips of the various parties for it, the agreement that this motion can be debated for a longer period than the normal three hours and that our speeches need not be quite so curtailed as they normally are. This is important in order to allow Members a fair chance of speaking. Quite a number of Members have already spoken to me and indicated that they want to speak. I am very glad that they will get a chance to do so as the three hour limitation would mean that basically there would be very little left after the proposing and seconding of the motion, the amendment and the reply.
I believe there will be no argument when I say that the report of the New Ireland Forum is one of the most important documents to be produced in the State over a great many years. It is important in its conclusions but it is extremely important in the process that went to its making, in the various submissions that came into it, in the remarkable quality of the oral evidence that was given to it, and in the whole educative process of the formation of the report of the debates of the Forum and of the effects that it has had on those who participated and those who listened. Basically, one of the most important things it did was to teach us to some extent how others may see us and to teach us that we need an acceptance of points of view other than those that come most closely to us. I welcome the way the report sets out the parameters in which we are discussing the whole situation in Northern Ireland and this State. I welcome the kind of aims that they set before us. There is no doubt at all in my mind that the dangers which have been described in chapter 2.4 of the report of lack of political initiative are only too real. It states:
The immediate outlook for the North is extremely dangerous unless an acceptable political solution is achieved. The long-term damage to society worsens each day that passes without political progress. In political, moral and human terms there is no acceptable level of violence. There are at present no political institutions to which a majority of people of the nationalist and unionist traditions can give their common allegiance or acquiesce in. The fundamental social bonds which hold people together in a normal community, already tenuous in the abnormal conditions of Northern Ireland, have been very largely sundered by the events and experiences in the past 15 terrible years.
The dangers described in chapter 2 are very far from being exaggerated. If we cannot make political progress in this situation, if we cannot produce some kind of politcal solution we might as well overtly hand over to the initiative of violence on both sides and to what in the end might be a final solution, in the sense that Hitler used it, as far as the Northern Unionists are concerned, that they should be put in a position where they must conform to what the Provisional IRA think Ireland is or they should leave or die. That is a solution that none of us here wants to achieve.
I very much share the ideals of a new Ireland which are outlined in the Forum report, particularly in chapter 4. I emphasise this because of some of the things I may say later this evening. I share the ideal of unity by consent. I, too, want a united Ireland, but I feel it is not enough for us to produce a report like this which sets out the problems, the different points of view and identity, suggest solutions and then that we should sit back and congratulate ourselves on having done a very good job of work. It is now that we need to begin to work at changing public attitudes. It is our job to change public attitudes here as well as trying to ensure that public attitudes change in Northern Ireland and to work at changing ourselves.
The analysis of the historic and present problems of Northern Ireland as contained in chapter 3 of the report is a good one. The report is correct in saying that with the kind of population it had, there was a basic instability in Northern Ireland and this is a thesis which I heard John Hume expound many times. He is perfectly right in saying that while you have such a large minority who were opposed to the state as it was you could not maintain a stable and a normal democratic political society. The analysis is also right in describing the kind of reaction which the Unionist majority had to this. This is dealt with in particular in paragraph 3.10 which states:
From the beginning, unionist insecurity in regard to their minority position in the island as a whole had a profound effect on the manner in which political structures were organised in the North. Political dialogue with the nationalists was avoided for fear of undermining the unionist system of exclusive power and privilege. Fears were stimulated of forcible absorption of unionists into an all-Ireland Republic, dominated as unionists saw it by a Roman Catholic and a Gaelic ethos. Those fears led many unionists to equate Roman Catholicism with nationalism and to regard the nationalist minority in the north as a threat to the survival of their power and privilege.
This is a description of the behaviour of the Unionist Party as I knew it growing up in Northern Ireland. When any new political initiative as, for instance, any new united labour movement in Northern Ireland began to show its face the Orange drum was taken out and beaten and the Unionist voters were frightened into maintaining the status quo on those lines. This was very well covered by Paddy Devlin in the talk which he gave in Lahinch last Monday. Because of this there is no doubt in my mind that successive Unionist Governments showed the dragon's teeth that sprang up into armed men in Northern Ireland. In many ways they were to blame for the type of discrimination which they indulged in and which alienated an entire community in Northern Ireland.
When we say this we should remember that for all the evils of Partition in this country — and they were many — the fact that there was Northern Ireland meant that this State — the Twenty-six Counties — was spared the sort of instability that can occur if you have a large and determined minority that threatens the very existence of the State. If we think back to what might have happened in 1922 if there was no Partition, and if it were the Government of Ireland who had to deal with a large and determined minority in the North who at that time would have been supported by quite a number of Southern Unionists in opposition to the existence of the State, we realise that we would have found it very much more difficult to produce the kind of State we have produced and about which there is a danger that we can be a bit self-satisfied.
In paragraph 3.12 where we describe our own State, we can be a bit self-satisfied about our stability, our tolerance, our lack of discrimination, and we do not make in the report anything like as deep a critical analysis of what happened in the southern part of Ireland as we do in the North. Granted it is dealing primarily with the North but it might have been a bit helpful to have a deeper analysis of what happened here.
It calls attention to the fact that one of the difficulties of Partition has been that there was no Unionist participation in the creation of government and in the creation of the State here and that is true. One must remember that there were Unionists here in 1922 but because they were such a small minority and because of the situation at the beginning of this State they felt marginalised and did not feel part of what was going on. It was not until about the sixties that the descendants of the original Unionists in this State began to feel integrated as a part of the Republic of Ireland. In the time I have tonight I cannot deal with this fully but I refer to a recent book by Kurt Bowen entitled Protestants in a Catholic State which is a history of the minority in the South of Ireland which gives a very good background of what happened, the developments of the change of the generations and how people began to feel an integral part of Ireland. Although I have certain criticisms of this assessment the conclusion in paragraph 3.7 is correct.
Since its establishment, partition has continued to overshadow political activity in both parts of Ireland. The country as a whole has suffered from this division and from the absence of a common purpose. The division has absorbed the energies of many, energies that otherwise would have been directed into constructing an Ireland in which nationalists and unionists could have lived and worked together.
I now look at the description of Unionist attitudes and identities in Chapter 4 in the assessment of the present problem. This is from paragraph 4.8 on. It is crucial to the Forum report that this section is there, that these attitudes and identities are seen to exist because in very many anti-Partition movements in the past and in many analyses of the situation from this side of the Border very little account was taken of the fact that people in the North had attitudes and an identity that they not only wanted to maintain but that we should wish to help them to maintain. The report has made a step forward that was not made before.
While I welcome this I feel that it is crucial to realise that this must affect our own attitudes and behaviour. Even the way we put the matter in paragraph 4.9.2 is a little ironic where it describes the Protestant tradition.
The Protestant tradition, which unionism seeks to embody, is seen as representing a particular set of moral and cultural values epitomised by the concept of liberty of individual conscience. This is often accompanied by a Protestant view of the Roman Catholic ethos as being authoritarian and as less respectful of individual judgment. There is a widespread perception among unionists that the Roman Catholic Church exerts or seeks to exert undue influence in regard to aspects of the civil and legal organisation of society which Protestants consider to be a matter for private conscience. Despite the implicit separation of Church and State in the 1937 Constitution, many unionists hold the view that the Catholic ethos has unduly influenced administration in the South and that the latter in its laws, attitudes and values has not reflected a regard for the ethos of Protestants living there.
It is not just a question of Unionists seeing it that way. Later in the report there is a summary of that which gives the impression of this as just the funny way Unionists look at things. In putting forward that point of view the Unionists have a good deal of truth on their side and if we do not accept that we will never make any progress. If we do not realise that there has been a good deal in our history and in our present to back their view, we may well be in the act of creating more of that view for them. The ideal which is put before the Irish people in the report is epitomised in paragraph 4.13.:
The new Ireland must be a society within which, subject only to public order, all cultural, political and religious beliefs can be freely expressed and practised. Fundamental to such a society are freedom of conscience, social and community harmony, reconciliation and the cherishing of the diversity of all traditions. The criteria which relate to public legislation may not necessarily be the same as those which inform private morality. Furthermore, public legislation must have regard for the conscientious beliefs of different minority groups. The implementation of these principles calls for deepening and broadening of the sense of Irish identity. No one living in Ireland should feel less at home than another or less protected by law than his or her fellow citizen. This implies in particular, in respect of Northern Protestants, that the civil and religious liberties that they uphold and enjoy will be fully protected and guaranteed and their sense of Britishness accommodated.
Leaving aside the sense of Britishness, which is a slightly different thing, one of the major questions that faces us is whether we have the ability to live up to this ideal and if we have even the desire to live up to this ideal. In the history of this State so far it is perfectly true that there has been little violence and little overt discrimination against minorities, but until at least the sixties I would suggest that there was very little effort to offer minorities here a picture of being Irish with which they themselves could identify. In the book by Kurt Bowen that I referred to he makes a distinction between assimilation and integration and suggests that assimilation of a minority means that that minority simply disappears to all intents and purposes and becomes a part of the majority, but integration would mean that the minority is brought into a society where, though all parties can feel that this is their society and they identify with this society, they can maintain their own diverse points of view and way of looking at things. It is very clear that in the Forum report the ideal which is being brought before us is not assimilation but integration in this sense, an integrated yet diverse society, whereas I am afraid that the fear of the Northern Protestants, the Northern Unionists, at present would certainly be that it would not be integration but assimilation if they were brought into a united Ireland. We have not yet succeeded in creating a society in which minorities in this State can integrate fully and identify as being completely Irish from the point of view of other people, if not just from the point of view of their own. How can we even think that without some deep change in public attitudes here and in the structure of our law and Constitution the Northern Ireland majority will identify as Irish and as part of this State as is put forward in paragraph 4.13? It is not sufficient to say, as seems to come across in the evidence given by the Roman Catholic Bishops to the Forum, "If you join us we will make sure that you will have your human rights". If we are not prepared to make a start now to allow for the sort of human rights that minorities need, if we are not prepared to do something practical about it ourselves, we have no credibility for the Northern majority and it is no use saying to them, "If you join us we will change everything". They would be very foolish to believe any such thing.
I am not asking for precipitate action but I am asking for a society that ceases to refuse to face these issues. In dealing with this I do not want to go into a whole argument about the possibility of a refernedum on divorce and so on, nevertheless this sort of issue is a litmus paper issue, and do not imagine that society in Northern Ireland is not watching it. It is easy for us to say it does not make any difference what we do, we will not be able to make the Northern Unionists happy. Maybe we will not, but we can certainly make them very unhappy. It was very interesting that when Bishop McNamara published his recent pastoral the media who rang me up and asked me for a reaction were not the Southern papers but the Belfast Telegraph and the Northern Ireland BBC. I consider that that shows very clearly that there is an interest in these matters from the Northern side and that people who are looking to the possibility of a change in the political situation watch these kind of things. If on this issue we disgrace ourselves again, as my predecessor, Senator Yeats once said, we may forget the Forum and the ballot box and we may reach for the Armalite on both sides, because that is what will happen.
We must also contrast what is said in the Forum report with what is said in the document produced by the Ulster Unionist Assembly Party Report Committee, which is entitled "The Way Forward". I will not confuse it with any other document which may happen to have a similar title. It is a discussion paper produced by the Unionist Party. When they look at the ideas put forward by the Forum they look on the Forum as a strategy to ensure a united Ireland, which it is in one sense, but it points out that, not only is it a component in the ongoing pressure for consent by the Unionists by producing what they describe as a charter of republican reasonableness, and I quote:
It is also necessary for it to set up a blueprint for political structures that would, ostensibly, accommodate unionists in a way that the Republic has never been able to do in the past, and which would have been inconsistent with the State's ethos and existing Constitution. It now appears at least probable that this entire strategy is about to fail. There is, at present, no apparent prospect of the British Government welshing on its guarantee; there is no hope of unionists falling into the trap of a unilateral declaration of independence; there seems little likelihood of the Forum being able to produce a blueprint for pluralism in the teeth of opposition from the church and partitionist republicanism.
We need to give that the lie, to show that that is not a correct analysis of what is going to happen here. To do that we need more than exhortation; we also need action. We need to get out of a society which shakes in its shoes at the rattle of Bishop McNamara's crozier. We need to get out of a society that accepts and introduces totally negative reflections of Roman Catholic teaching in our Constitution while making virtually no effort to cope with the problems on the ground. If we really care about the Forum report making progress we would see that it is not just a question of saying "If you join we will accommodate you" but of a real acceptance of an Irish identity that does not require Roman Catholic teaching to be enshrined in the law and Constitution and that can allow Catholics themselves to be adults and follow their faith without State compulsion.
I have not time to deal with all the issues which are raised in the Forum report. It is important that they produce an economic report as well. Whatever about alienation through feelings of minorities there is a thorough danger in both parts of Ireland that such a large proportion of the population will be alienated through economic and social deprivation that both establishments will face a revolutionary situation which will change the entire face of Ireland.
Various solutions are put forward such as a unified State a federal/confederal solution or joint authority. On this I would urge that we should to some extent keep an open mind. Generally speaking, the difficulties of the federal and the joint authority solution might well outweigh their advantages and in the end what we will want is a unitary State, but if we felt that some progress was to be made by other means we should not turn our backs on it.
I would end this contribution in a personal way. I make no excuse for this because, after all, I am or was one of those whom you are seeking to win over, to make part of your integrated Ireland, a member of the Northern Ireland Protestant majority. I threw in my lot with the integrated ideal of Ireland which is set out in the Forum report. If what I have done over the past 20 years means anything it means this. In a sense I was a child of the sixties, a child of the new hopes and changes that happened then. I was interested to read in The Sunday Tribune last Sunday the reflections of Fr. A. Flannery who felt that he too was a child of that period of hope and change and was worried about what was happening now.
In the past few years I can only say that I sometimes wondered about the reality of these hopes that we had at that time. It seems to me that there is a swing both in the Church and in the State against creative change, that there is a re-creation of entrenched attitudes. I referred in a broadcast earlier this week to a new moral McCarthyism. I was interested to get a letter today when I came into the Seanad in which somebody who is not a constituent of mine, who is a Catholic living in Dublin, said that he bore out at much greater strength, and felt that I was much too polite about it, what I said about the creation of this moral McCarthyism. In the past year I have had the feeling that, despite all the close personal relationships I have, I am to some extent marginalised and rejected, that a different picture of Irishness is being built up with no room for the likes of me and, a fortiori, no room for the Northern Protestants.
When I say this I do not want those who speak after me to react by reassuring me that they value me and so on. Perhaps they do not, but nevertheless if they do, I do not want them to reassure me personally. That pays tribute to their hearts and to their personal qualities, and I know my fellow Senators have these. What is important to me is that Senators should go away and think why I should feel like this and try to understand that, while my whole political and community life has been aimed at the sort of ideal set forth in the Forum report, a united Ireland with room for diversity and pluralism, I am from time to time tempted to say to people from whence I came: "Fight to the last drop of your blood to keep out of the hypocrisy of a freedom which is overshadowed by ecclesiastical influence". I have felt this particularly during the past few days and, indeed, as Senator Bulbulia will understand, this very afternoon.
In saying this I am trying desperately to say how much we must accept change if what we are aiming at is the ideal set out in this report, how much we need a less monolithic society if we are to achieve Wolfe Tone's ideals and the Forum's ideal, how much we need change if we are to show that the Forum is serious and that we are not going to accept the alternative of handing over to the gunmen. If we want to hand over to the gunmen, let us be honest about that and admit it. If the Forum ideal is what we are about, let us be honest about that too, and commit ourselves to doing something about it. There are people in the North, people of the Unionist tradition, who can and do try to envisage political change, who are not entrenched in the "not an inch" situation, but they are placed in a very difficult situation where they are in danger of being accused of being Lundies and traitors. By our actions we must help these people, and help them to emerge in northern society and not merely shut the door in their faces. This is my appeal to the House this evening.