I should like to begin by regretting that there are not more speakers on this motion from the Fianna Fáil side of the House. A valuable point made by the previous speaker is that, as the party that has received the greatest support from the Irish people, more votes than any other party, one might reasonably expect that they would discharge that responsibility properly. I cannot, for example, consider that no Fianna Fáil Deputy or Senator has ever experienced the situation in which nobody has come to speak about marital difficulties or the case for changing the legal situation whereby there can be some civil remedy for marital breakdown. It is not good enough to simply sit silent, wait for the other parties to debate this issue and not offer an opinion.
I might make one point absolutely and unequivocally clear. The Labour group of Senators in this House — and this motion is before Seanad Éireann — will be voting unanimously in support of the amendment. We favour a referendum in the lifetime of this Government. In so far as reference has been made to it I should also like to clarify the position as regards the Labour Party and divorce. The Labour Party have, at one conference after another, supported a change in the law which would allow the possibility of divorce as an option and the preliminary step of the holding of a referendum to remove the constitutional impediment and ban on divorce. May I go further and say that when I look back across the political debate on this issue, since 1923 when W.B. Yeats spoke in this House, I look at the proceedings of the Labour Party. The Labour Party have a very fine record of concern for the situation that had arisen particularly after the 1937 Constitution. At one conference after another they have debated the issue and always come out in favour of an amendment in this area. The only difference about the last annual conference of the Labour Party was that no opposition was expressed at that conference to removing the constitutional impediment on divorce. That is not to say that there are not members of our party who hold reservations about the holding of a referendum. But the position of the party is that we favour a referendum in the lifetime of this Government. I would like to make that point very clear. What I sometimes find rather strange is that a party like ourselves, which now enjoy less than 10 per cent of the support of the electorate, can be used as the principle for a party that enjoy a great deal more support of our people avoiding what I believe to be their duty.
A fundamental issue arises in the discussion of this report. I should like to welcome it and pay tribute as other Senators have done, to the thoroughness of the report. It would be very wrong to think that this report should perform the task that should be accomplished when we are discussing the precise forms of divorce legislation. It was a committee to address itself, in a very preliminary way, to the whole question of marital breakdown. I am moved by the very thorough speeches being made by the women Members of the Seanad who have spoken so far. I hope that when people comment on this debate they will acknowledge the contribution to civil rights that has been made by the people who served on the committee and particularly the women Members who have spoken.
I am worried about one fundamental in approaching the discussion on this report so far. It is in relation to the question of whether divorce and the right to remarry is a human right or is not. The Knights of Columbanus, as reported in the Irish Independent of 28 September, 1984, have a very clear position. The Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbanus, Mr. Vincent Gallagher, is quoted as saying that divorce is not a human right. As I understand it, the Fianna Fáil view is that the right to remarry is something less than a human right; it is, in fact, a bargaining position. As I look back on statements from the Fianna Fáil Party I begin to think there is a hint-hint, nudge-nudge that it might surface as something which you could have in your hand to bargain with members of the Northern Ireland population should you be discussing unity. This view is a dangerous one. Unfortunately it is reflected in the contributions of some distinguished people, such as Professor Mary McAleese, who is reported in the Law Society Gazette of June 1979, in the text of a paper read by her to the society's annual conference in Galway from 3 to 6 May, 1979, pages 95 to 98. She indulges in the unusual practice for a lawyer — from whom I would have expected the exactitude of the basic discipline of law, that is administrative law — by on the one hand arguing very strongly against divorce on the basis of what she calls “its impact on the social fabric.” By training I am a sociologist but rarely if ever in this House introduce anything I have to say with the preface as a sociologist, because it would be singularly absurd to introduce a priestly mode of reference to anything that I have to say in that regard. But it does not stop lawyers, including the distinguished Professor Mary McAleese, from coming out with the extraordinary statement, as she does in her article, that divorce is “a social evil.” I am not sure in what context lawyers use the term “evil”. They certainly rarely use such terminology when addressing judges. Those who are represented by Professor McAleese find it easy to make this statement in papers like the one to which I made reference.
This is a very dangerous line of argument. First — and let us be unemotive about it — it argues for a connection between the law and society which is problematic. There is a discussion in the sociology of law, as it happens, as to what impact laws have and do not have on social practice. Yet for the lobby that opposes divorce in this country no problem exists. They have two basic assumptions, one is that changing the law will lead to some kind of social collapse. However, their view is not as unsophisticated as that. They see a package of measures as speeding us towards a slide into moral collapse. Thus divorce is fired in along with contraception, abortion and indeed usually by the more extreme elements with recognition of the rights of homosexuals and others. They are, all together, a package which is tending towards the dissolution of society. There is not one whit of evidence offered by these people for the connection between the innovations in law and the social consequences to which they make reference. I challenge people in this debate to offer such evidence because I intend in my own contribution to take up this question as to the social impact of divorce legislation in other jurisdictions. In fact it is rather ignorant, insulting and offensive for people within legislatures in Ireland to be foisting on to other populations and other communities, which have their own legislatures, sets of consequences and aspects of moral depravity in respect of which they are reluctant to offer evidence. There is another issue which arises and which is related to that, the suggestion as to what is the connection between divorce as a human right and moral order. When we discuss the relationship of divorce legislation to the moral order it is rarely — intriguingly — discussed by lawyers in terms of the civil moral order. What they seek to do is to test the legislation against Catholic moral order or religious moral order, for example, is it moral or immoral to suggest to a population that they have to wait for the fundamental facility to remarry until they have finished the political process of bargaining?
