I want to thank the Chair for accommodating me as I know there are a lot of people who wish to speak. I feel in my position, invited by both parties to come to Seanad Éireann as an Independent, it is very important that I participate in this motion, and I am very glad to do so. I hope that what I say will be taken in a constructive light, because that is the spirit in which it is intended. It is important to expose the implications of this motion in relation to the perception that the people in Northern Ireland have of the Republic and, in particular, the way in which the Northern Protestant community look at it. After all, if the Constitution and the people of the Republic are earnestly seeking to invite what I have often referred to as the Irish minority to come with them in a spirit of unity to create a new Ireland for the future, we must start by asking ourselves — I will conclude by asking the question again — are we certain that we are interested in creating a pluralist Ireland rather than a Catholic country? That is an important question and I would respect the answer either way. It must be honestly faced and there is an opportunity in this debate to let it be known not only to the people of the Republic but, more importantly, to those at present who feel most threatened by the advances they feel are being made by this State on the integrity of the territory in which they have lived for so long. This is what is perceived. Therefore, it is very important that we ask ourselves how are we going to go forward — are we sincerely interested in developing a pluralist Ireland that can accommodate all the minorities and traditions of any significance in the country as Irishmen, or are we mainly concerned to establish the development of a Catholic country?
The report of the Joint Committee on Marriage Breakdown in years to come will be seen as a milestone in the development of Irish family law. I would, therefore, commence by paying tribute to those members of the joint committee under the chairmanship of Deputy Willie O'Brien. I hope that every person administering the marriage rites throughout Ireland will ensure that they obtain a copy of this report and study it. I will go further and say that nobody should be administering marriage rights, be they in a civil capacity or in a clerical capacity, without reading this report because it highlights many of the difficulties which Senators have alluded to.
Furthermore, it should be produced in a slightly more readable form. Perhaps the summary at the end should be extracted and points from it highlighted for the benefit of young people who may be considering marriage and who may want to know what the legal implications of what they are doing are and the social consequences of problems which occurred in the past for other people. Most people entering into marriage are not very interested in social consequences at that stage but they might wish to know more about the legal implications. Here we have a report which should provide a standard guide to the State aid available to them and the mechanisms whereby in future we would hope to develop a more humane and more urbane attitude to the whole problem of marital breakdown or marital difficulty. This report is a very humane document which has tried hard to struggle with the problem, not in a legalistic sense but in a human sense. It has taken into account the great difficulties — social, emotional, and psychological — of those involved in this dilemma.
I hope in the course of my contribution to develop a personal viewpoint on the matter of divorce which might well be held by my co-religionists in the North and also to try to link this up with what I see as essential: that we must always keep before us the sanctity of marriage vows and what we mean by marriage vows, how they are obtained, how much is understood about vowing at the time the vow is made and how much responsibility is taken by those who deliver the vow at the time that it might have to be broken if this legislation is to pass on to a situation where divorce is permitted.
In that respect I will argue very strongly for the removal of all clauses in any civil Constitution which seeks to establish any absolute position, particularly an absolute position based on a particular set of moral perceptions in relation to the moral law with which any group of significance in the society profoundly disagree. As I said in another debate allied to this subject, the essence of being human as opposed to being divine is to entertain the possibility of doubt. Therefore, absolutism in a Constitution that claims to speak for the people as a whole has no place at all. That is not to say that absolutism cannot be the prerogative of a particular Church if that Church so wishes to hold on to absolute views on the basis of divine inspiration.
I would like to dwell briefly now on the aspect of minority and human rights. We can go back to the peace settlement of 1919 when there was a break up of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the Treaty of Versailles there was a great deal of consideration given to minority rights. It has always interested me how the great allied powers who had won that war seemed to be so concerned about the rights of minorities inside the defeated territories but they certainly never expanded those rights to include minorities inside their own territories. In fact, at one stage in the debate when the right of minorities as a global concern was dealt with, they retreated from making it an all embracing right. Nevertheless, the rights of minorities were discussed at that time. Generally speaking, the various arrangements for the protection of the rights of minorities provided for:
Equality before the law in relation to civil and political rights, freedom or religion, own language and maintenance of own religious and educational establishments.
In a different context I have argued in the North of Ireland for the right of the Irish language to have a place in the curriculum of the so-called State schools and I have urged in respect of interdenominational schools that they cannot be inter-denominational unless they respect the right of the minority language in the territory of Northern Ireland. I, therefore, feel that I am on fairly strong ground when I now make an appeal for other rights which are related to rights which the Protestant community firmly believe it is reasonable for them to have in relation to their own religious precepts.
Under the universal declaration on human rights everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this declaration without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language or religion. There is reference to the right of religious groups in the international United Nations covenants on civil and political rights. In the report there is a section which deals with the conflict between the Irish constitutional position on the prohibition of the dissolution of marriage and the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 14 of that convention states:
The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any grounds, such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with the national minority, property birth or other status.
When we talk about the rights and freedoms set forth in this convention we have only to read article 8. I will not bore you with the tedium of re-reading it as I am sure some Senators must have alluded to it. It is contained within the report of the Joint Committee on Marriage Breakdown. Perhaps I could just briefly allude to it. It states that everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. We can go through a number of such conventions, articles, and so on and so forth, but the point that I am making is that we have evolved, particularly in western Europe in recent times, to a point where minority rights are becoming a very important issue indeed. It is when we talk even of the right to self-determination as any member of the Northern minority will well know, that this is now seen by any reasonably-thinking and certainly any far-thinking person as a right to self-determination for minorities as well as majorities. The question, of course, is how do we arrange an accommodation? I will come back to that later in the context of this debate.
It was interesting to me that there were 700 written submissions and 24 oral submissions, so that the subject is something which has engendered a great deal of debate. From the outcome we can say that that debate is constructive. It has not only shown why there should be change but it has also put forward the arguments for why change is fraught with pitfalls and dangers. Therefore, it has alerted the writers and those who took the time and trouble to debate the issues contained in the report to dangers in making swift, far-reaching changes in this particular law. It has resulted in a number of very positive proposals being made to try to cope with the effects that such change might bring about and to try as far as possible to ensure that the change would be for the benefit and well-being of the people and not for their further disillusionment.
A few points that I will just highlight relate to the process of education. It is essential that we make our young people more aware of what is involved in living in a highly complex society in relation to the marriage bond. There is a lack of the support of the extended family which used to exist and also, I am afraid, the lack of what I was alluding to in another discussion this afternoon: the lack of a feeling of community cohesiveness. There is a great sense in many people's lives today of isolation and loneliness. Out of that isolation and loneliness, particularly if talents have not had an opportunity to fully develop, and if the person has lacked this opportunity for full individual development, there is a lack of confidence. Where there is a lack of confidence it is very easy to become threatened, defensive and negative and for aggravation and frustration to lead on to the sort of frustrations that exist in a home which lead eventually to the fragmentation of the marriage and the dissolution of it.
The point about counselling is vital. The idea of a pre-marriage counselling service is an excellent one, as is the idea of counselling for the married person. At times I could well have done with a counsellor myself. Occasionally, when I am rushing off at about 6 a.m. in the morning in the dark to the Seanad having operated all the previous day, a counsellor at the back door might be perhaps as appropriate as the petrol pump attendant if I have not filled the car the previous night.
I thought it was excellent that the report stressed the need for mediation. Having decided the number of options, does one want a bi-partisan discussion about one's future? Does one want a tri-partisan discussion? Does one want a mediation service? Does one want an umpire? I asked Senator Rogers earlier would she like to have her marriage umpired and she assured me she would not. We both agreed that "mediation service" seemed to have hit the right word and the right tone. It has at least stimulated the imagination as to what might be possible in the context of a complex society with increasing marital problems.
The idea of lowering the minimum age for marriage down to 18 years is excellent. If we have given majority to our citizens at 18 years of age, as I have said frequently in this House, we should trust them as citizens who have the unique gift of youth to contribute to our society. Just as age has its own gifts in wisdom and experience, so youth has something to say in terms of vigour, vitality and inspiration for the rest of us. I cannot see, if we have now agreed to give our citizens the right to full responsibility at 18 years of age, that they should not be allowed to freely enter into marriage at that age. The idea of having guardians and the court involved in the 16 to 18 age group is logical. We have used the age 18 years for good or for bad as the dividing line between the minor and the major fully mature citizen.
Some of the factors involved in breakdown were alluded to. The one I highlight is the waning influence of the extended family. Again, this highlights the need to think in Ireland, as we move to the future, of how we can reduce the scale of our enterprise so that whenever change is coming about it is related to a scale to which we can easily relate, so that we are challenged rather than threatened by it, and we are more likely to have an input into the changes which affect us. I think the community scale as well as the extended family are factors of importance in marital breakdown.
We come next to the problems caused by marriage breakdown. There is an allusion to the increasing numbers of illegitimate births and the increasing numbers of single parents. This comes back again to the whole business of the late 20th century alienation, where man is not only separated from mankind or human kind, separated from his neighbour or family, from his work, but even from the deep inner self. There is a great conflict between the projected image. What we are doing very often is related to what we hope to get in the next moment rather than being a person in the moment in which we are involved and finding that as our focus for full development. The whole problem of alienation is a big issue which we as a society have not really addressed ourselves to sufficiently. We hear about alienation in another context, but I wish people would expand the whole area of discussion into much wider issues than just how one feels in the North.
I have asked the question whether our alienation means that personal relations are not able any longer to sustain the penetration and permanency of an enduring growth involved in the unity of two people in the bond of marriage. I have been to fishing communities in the north of Scotland. I used to spend a lot of time with them. I could see there very unalienated people with a deep and abiding affection and respect for themselves. In one sense it was quite a precarious society, and certainly an unsophisticated one, but in another sense there was a very real sense of human worth.
I was glad to see that the adversarial nature of the legal system has been addressed. One has only to be witness in the High Court — and I am sure it goes for Dublin as well as Belfast — to be appalled at what I have referred to elsewhere as the professional class conspiracy and the intimidating effect of the whole legal process in the High Courts of law. There may have been a time in the past when that was essential in order to keep the natives under control, but that time and that day has long gone.
What we are interested in now is trying to create support for people who are in distress and to realise that there is no one cause for an effect. The idea that a woman who falls into a hole in the road dug out by another man can sue the man or the person for whom the man works and that he becomes blame-worthy entirely for the falling into the hole is a nonsense. The person has her faculties and the hole has none. The question I, therefore, ask is can we not begin to see? That is why I am delighted about the highlighting of this adversarial legal approach. We are taking about a multitude of causes producing an effect. This requires wisdom and an instinctual approach much more than a legalistic and highly rational one. We will never go anywhere if we are only concerned with what goes on in the head. The spirit and the heart are part of the whole and in recent decades we have discarded them at our peril.
The effect of destructive parental interaction all ties up with what we have already mentioned. We mentioned the feelings of alienation, isolation and loneliness, the feelings of inadequacy and lack of importance, the feelings of not having power to do anything effective in life and not having an outlet for creative activity. This drives people in on themselves. It certainly has had a more terrible effect on the male rather than the female. I do not wish to sound chauvinistic when I say that a woman, in a sense, in spite of the terrible hardships she has had to suffer in the home, has had a tremendous forum for her creative outlet in her home which man, I hope, in the coming decades will share much more, but to date he has not felt quite as much at home in that sharing as he should. I am very beholden to a certain Senator who suggested that that might be my own problem too. As a result one has had to try to make some adjustment. As the report says, adjustment for spouses and children is very painful.
Let us come to the question of the law of nullity. I was appalled to hear that there had been no legislative intervention in the law of nullity since the Matrimonial Causes and Marriage Law (Ireland) (Amendment) Act, 1870. It is very valuable that the report highlights the ambiguity between civil and church law. Let us be fair. We are talking about the church law in the Republic of Ireland. We have not come to the Constitution yet. It affects essentially over 95 per cent of the people living here. We are talking about a small minority, in spite of the fact that it has considerable significance in the context of the overall conflict and problems of Ireland. This question of the conflict and of the ambiguous nature of the civil and the religious law needs to be looked at very seriously. Again, I will be alluding to that shortly.
The professional class conspiracy is certainly highlighted by the fact that the cost of a day's outing in court to bring a case of nullity and have it defended, is £3,000. That is an appalling indictment of our system. Perhaps that is because it goes on to speak of the complexity of the procedure. Again, one is delighted to read that this report is addressing itself to simplifying the procedure.
The inconsistency of human judgment is alluded to. Even learned judges can differ in their appreciation of cases on different days and at different times in the same way as examiners can, as some well-known examiners in this House know only too well. They can, depending on their form, allot marks in different ways at different times. That is part of life's experience. We cannot expect total consistency. Otherwise we would be living in a different type of world. We must strive to bring consistency into the operation as far as is humanly possible. With reference to involvement of the religious communities, it is stated in paragraph 7 (1) (24) (c):
it would be desirable that the nature of a contract and its legal consequences should be made clear to the parties at the time of the ceremony.
I would say "Amen" to that. That comes into the whole business of the preparation for marriage, the education for marriage and the responsibility of those who have the sacred and social task of administering the marriage vow. It would be nice to think that we could move rapidly into a situation where the nature of the contract and its legal consequences would be made clear to the parties at the time of the ceremony. That is why I would stress once again that this report should be compulsory reading for all those who are responsible for bonding within the context of State law. Nullity should not result in illegitimacy. We have argued that before, and I am sure we will argue it again. It seems a very unfair start to life that the child should be found guilty — if "guilt" is the right word — for something that was not in any way its responsibility.
The grounds for judicial separation have been considerably expanded. That is a good thing. In fact, the whole emphasis is to be on breakdown, rather than on specific fault. I would support that to the hilt. It is more vague in one sense and in another sense it does specify that breakdown is what we are trying to cope with, and we are not opening the sluice gates, as is one of the fears, to making divorce readily available for anything less than what is seen to be transparently a situation of breakdown.
The legal remedies as outlined in paragraph 7 (3) (6) lay down that the court should have the power to decide: (1) who shall have the right to live in the family home; (2) how various properties should be divided; (3) how best interests of children will be protected; (4) how maintenance is to be awarded; (5) that a legal separation agreement may be converted into an order of judicial separation; and (6) that irretrievable breakdown should be the one overall ground for judicial separation rather than alluding to the fault principle. The emphasis later on in the sections dealing with maintenance is vitally important. I have not had many people who asked me to take up issues since I was fortunate enough to be nominated as an Independent here, but one of the issues certainly has been the problem of the defaulting party not paying the allowance which the court said should be paid to the other party. I was, therefore, very pleased to find that the State should be empowered to make payments of maintenance to victims of default and that is the duty of the State to recoup from the defaulting party, not leaving it to the unfortunate party who is at his or her wit's end trying to obtain what is his or her legal right.
The pursuit of defaulters into member states is mentioned. That is excellent, because certainly in regard to the closest member state, you only have to hop across the Irish Sea to escape legislation in this respect. I stand to be corrected there. Certainly, the pursuit into member states is an excellent idea. Perhaps this is something which is being discussed in the present ongoing Anglo-Irish talks as one of the peripheral issues.
The idea that the judge should have support in terms of a legal social service attached to the courts is essential in today's complex world. Judges, by the very nature of their occupation, are unlikely to be wandering around with the Simon Community at night, or out in the local docks, or trying to see what the queue is like at the employment exchange. It would be very unlikely — and it would be unreasonable of us to expect — that they would be able to put themselves into the position of the deprived people in our community whose marriages are breaking up. They have difficulty enough in coping with those who belong to their own social class. They need some sort of professional help to put the problem into perspective and to show the various ways in which it can be addressed with the agencies that exist in the State and, hopefully, with those which will be developed by the State as a result of this report. Of course, the establishment of a family tribunal is very much to be commended as part of this ongoing process. There is an interesting reference in 41 (3) (2) to the Committee on the Constitution, 1967. I am sure some Senators must have alluded to it. It states:
In the case of a person who was married in accordance with the rites of a religion, no law shall be enacted providing for the grant of a dissolution of that marriage on grounds other then those acceptable to that religion.
The report goes on to add that it might be necessary to add a clause to the effect that the above was not to be regarded as contravening any other provision in the Constitution prohibiting religious discrimination. I would like to alert the Seanad to the fact that as long ago as 1967 it was recognised that there were distinct rights pertaining to Irish people of different religions and that something had to be done to accommodate those rights.
Various arguments have been put in favour of divorce, saying that it is an injustice not to have it. By not having it, there is no recognition of any new relationship by the State, regardless of how wronged the person entering into the second relationship may have felt. There is no real legal protection for parties, plus or minus their children, with regard to maintenance, succession, violence, and so on. The children are illegitimate, as yet. The family suffers substantial disadvantages with regard to tax and social welfare. There are effects also on the first marriage remnants — and I have used that word deliberately — because too often when we are discussing this problem we forget that there may be a party left with nothing only a memory of a tragedy and a broken home, a broken house and a broken life. How are we going to legislate for them at least make them feel that they can reintegrate into society?
All the minority Churches, with the exception of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, are in davour of divorce. I thought the Quaker suggestions particularly apt. They suggested that there should be a period of five years of marriage before any permissible divorce and a six-month interval before the abdication and commencement of proceedings.
The ban has not prevented marital breakdown, as we know. The level of marriage breakdown — and this is a highly significant observation — North and South are similar in spite of the fact that divorce has been available in Northern Ireland since 1937, perhaps not without significance as the year in which the present Constitution was ratified and became law.
To deny the right to remarry to a spouse subjected to cruelty seems to be cruel in itself, without any social advantage accruing to the State. There are a number of arguments against divorce. Senators will have read them. There is the floodgate theory, and the theory that divorce will reduce the protection to the family afforded by the present Constitution and could reduce the determination of the couple in difficulties to try to make a success of the marriage. I will come back to that in my concluding remarks. There is the theory that it will produce confusion among children deprived of near relationships.
However, in the report the committee counter this with positive proposals. There must be better education for marriage, a higher age for marriage and more extensive counselling. The report goes to show how this counselling can be brought about in terms of its chapter on mediation, which should be essential reading for anyone interested in the subject and, finally, the idea of a new family court structure. I am not proposing, because of time, to go into the details of these as they can well be read. I certainly support the conclusions. They have been documented and we have now got a base line from which to move forward.
I would not like to conclude, however, without making some mention of one of the two most important aspects of this, that is, the effect on society and on the individual of the vow. In today's society vows can very often be taken lightly, because the full implication of what one is about is not completely comprehended, nor are the parties sufficiently penetrated by what they are doing to be aware of the consequences of its undoing. I would like to put on record — and I gave it considerable thought some weeks ago lest in my position as a northern Protestant I should be misunderstood in relation to the great concern the Catholic Church has shown over the centuries for the indissolubility of marriage and for the sanctity of marriage — that marriage breakdown represents failure. Legislation which would make such failure worse is, in my view, bad for the family and the community. The emotional failure and the undermining of self-confidence which such failure inevitably causes is transferred to children and such children lose confidence in establishing relationships. On the other hand, in legislation which recognises failure and tries and seems to come to terms with it, and which is concerned to repair at least in part and in as far as it can the damage created by such breakdown, there lies the essence of my hope — and I imagine the hope of many others here — for rehabilitation and expression of our compassion.
Let there be no mistake about it — a broken vow is the expression of a broken person. If, in connection with such broken vow there is no feeling of guilt, it is only possible to conclude that there was no properly understood vow in the first place. Guilt and remorse cannot be separated from the breaking of vows properly understood. Such guilt and remorse are destructive to the development of any subsequent inter-personal relationships and as a result are destructive to the fabric of society as a whole. Guilt and remorse can be just as destructive as dead marriage. We have got to consider how we can influence people involved in such a dilemma to follow a process of reintegration or, in theological terms, atonement.
If there is no guilt and remorse, I can only conclude that the taking of the vow did not penetrate the inner being of the person in the way that vows by definition should do. The flippancy of the participant may be no worse than the failure of the vows' administrator to impart the meaning of what is involved. We must ask if those who choose to take a vow had been adequately prepared by those who administer such to receive into their inner being the significance of what they are affirming and the choice involved in making such affirmation.
In marriage, then, there are three human parties involved in the vow — the couple and the administrator. Ideally, the unalienated bonding of two unalienated people should allow them to realise a capacity for the infinite in the totality of their relationships. This is the ideal. On the other hand, destructive bondings is fragmentary and leaves persons out of tune with themselves and increasingly separated from the other. Rebonding, without resolution of the alienation of the broken bond, can only be a diminished bonding in relation to the capacity of the whole person defined in a loving relationship with another person — completeness.
We must, therefore, be clear what we as a society, through the support given to the administrators of our vows as well as to the couple concerned, have created in marriage, just as we must be clear about the effects of what is being broken when marriage is dissolved.
The Church that administers the vow of marriage can understandably be aggrieved to be denied any role at the time of the dissolution of the marriage. We cannot swing from a position where the Church had too great a say to a position where the Church has no say. It seems therefore that the Church responsible for the administration of a marriage vow should be asked at the time of any dissolution of the bonding created by that vow, two questions: one, what preparation was made for the marriage vow of the persons concerned, as administered by the clergyman concerned? And two, what was the degree of understanding transmitted to the parties of the mystical, legal and social implications and obligations of the vows which they are or were asked to take? If the State has had no role in the making of the marriage at the time of a marriage, there is logic in the suggestion that the Church should have the sole right to annual a marriage or to refuse such annulment of a marriage celebrated by it. State involvement in marriage annulment would suggest the need for State participation — a State ceremony as well as a Church ceremony at the time of a marriage — and the report of the Joint Committee on Marriage Breakdown makes such a recommendation.
Remarriage in a Church, for example, in the Presbyterian Church, without first undergoing a reintegrating process to atone for the broken vow of the first marriage seems to me as a Presbyterian a disturbing contradiction. Just as community confession in the remote past was a means of expurgating guilt and reachieving wholeness or atonement, so it would seem that the contradiction inherent in the remarriage of a party to a broken vow can only be resolved by recourse to such redemptive process so that the parties involved can be reintegrated as whole persons into the wholeness of the community represented by the institution that administered the initial vow or vows broken by them. The failure to heal the effects of this breakdown compromises integrity as has been felt at one time or another by us all. In the clinical situation I see it often and in its most extreme and aggressive form it leads to nervous breakdown and much worse.
The mystical dimension of marriage and the moral law are central to the potential of marriage for loving family care. However, the State has to cope with many situations in which the parties seem neither to be aware of mystical union nor to be fully appraised of the reasons for the moral law or of the effects of contravening it. This is where the State should become involved; and this is where this report is to be commended. This is also where we, as Senators, should challenge absolute positions in written consititutions which should, of necessity, reflect the degree of consensus that must be the basis of any claim to unity underwritten by them. In other words, the imposition of uniformity cannot create unity; unity is a paradox for it is based on the acknowledgement of diversity. In a State where second bondings do not infringe State law — and Ireland is one of those — the denial of divorce is nonsensical. I support this view with a quotation from W. B. Yeat's speech in the Seanad in 1925:
You are going to have indissoluble marriage but you are going to permit separation. You are going to invite men and women in the prime of life to accept for the rest of their existence the law of the cloisters. Do you think you are going to succeed in what the entire of Europe has failed to do for the last 2,000 years? A great English judge, speaking out of the immensity of his experience, said that there is no cause of irregular sexual relations so potent as separation without the possibility of remarriage.
In 1937 the divorce issue was again raised in the debate on the Articles of the new Constitution. In discussing a matter which would have such profound implications not only in the south of Ireland but in the whole of Ireland, the debate had to be stopped twice in order to ensure the presence of a quorum of 20 delegates — there were over 20 present here earlier on. The Constitution of 1937 which contains Articles 41.3.2 was eventually ratified in a referendum by the people with — please note — 685,000 approximately votes cast in favour; 525,000 votes cast against; 31 per cent of those entitled to vote did not do so.
A quick mathematical calculation will show that less than 40 per cent of the people in the Republic voted in favour of the 1937 Constitution — hardly an overwhelming result. That was the year in which divorce was brought in by law in Northern Ireland. In the same Constitution are the controversial Articles 2 and 3. We who live in Northern Ireland should ask what might have happened had it been possible to canvass the Northern vote to which these Articles apply and to which the Constitution seems to lay claim. If some Senators will argue that that is the fault of the Unionist population, I feel I have a perfect right as an Irish Protestant who wishes to live in an all-Ireland State, to make this point.
As long ago as 1967 the Report of the Committee on the Constitution made constructive recommendations with regard to Article 41. One might ask why so little has happened since that report was published. I could go through the six main points but I am sure that other Senators have already done so; the points can be found in that report to show in effect that Vatican II had changed the attitude of the official Catholic Church in this matter and that the State in many ways had a more harsh interpretation of the problem of marital breakdown than had the Church in consequence of what was decided in Vatican II. In section 127 of the 1967 Report of the Committee on the Constitution it states: "It is unnecessarily harsh and rigid and could, in our view, be regarded at being at variance with the accepted principles of religious liberty as declared at the Vatican Council and elsewhere."
It was further acknowledged then that something had to be done to regularise the position whereby those with money, know-how and nerve could leave the country to obtain what more modest people who lived within it were being denied. The people of Northern Ireland would like, just as you would like, to live in a society without the strains and pressures that encourage the degree of alienation which results in increasing marital breakdown. Yet they need reassurance that when it has occurred people will not be obliged to face the future in the loneliness of isolation as the only alternative to bonding illicitly with no legal protection on the grounds that failure is final and a second chance is not to be tolerated.
A number in the region of 50,000 people suffer from irretrievable breakdown. Should there be an average two children per couple involved, then a further 50,000 Irish citizens are affected. This is not all. If the Italian experience is anything to go by, it is estimated that prior to the granting of divorce, one-third of those separating in that country had re-established new extra-legal families. Should these bondings average one child each, we can then add approximately a further 15,000 affected children to the number of people in the Republic of Ireland affected by marital breakdown — I emphasise irretrievable marital breakdown.
The objection to divorce, therefore, cannot rest on the fact that it brings the relationship to an end. That can already be done by a separation order. The objection to divorce would therefore seem to be that it releases partners for re-marriage; yet annulment already permits parties to enter into a second relationship through marriage. I mentioned a story I heard last week and I can verify it, that a couple whose marriage was in the process of breaking down went to a compassionate priest who said; "Keep trying for another two years and if it does not work out we will probably be able to get you an annulment." I can understand the compassion but I cannot understand the inconsistency because in effect he was saying "Even if you have not had a valid marriage"— which in fact is what would be said if the annulment were granted —"go ahead and live together". That seems to be a contradiction of the official Catholic position on marriage. I would hope, however, that in exposing that particular episode — I am exposing it from the point of view of commending the priest for his compassion but also to highlight the contradictory position in which those who are the officers of the Church find themselves when confronted with the human situation that everyone knows existed among their parishioners.
In the final analysis, as regards the objections on the grounds of morality the State can no more alter the moral perception of a Church then can a Church be allowed to dictate the legal position within its State for those who belong to other Churches within that State. Finally, the Constitution should reflect the degree of consensus that must be the basis of any claim to unity. A significant proportion of the Irish people, whose consent for unity is forever being sought, is not impressed by absolute positions being defined for them in the Constitution. There is no way that such positions will ever yield the consensus which has thus far eluded us and about which we hear so much.
Let us have a referendum on Article 41.3.2 so that we can see what the reality is and let it be in the lifetime of this Parliament so that we may determine whether or not in our own lifetime it is realistic to go on hoping for Irish unity, whether we can read the smoke signals from the 26 Counties which say, "We, as good Catholics, will remain true to our Catholic religion but as Irish democrats we will permit those of you who feel just as convinced about what you think is right for your people, to have it, and to have it protected by the laws of the land." That is what this referendum is about. Shirk it, and it is another episode, as I said once before, in the tale of Mickey Mouse and do not let us see Mickey Mouse rise again in the course of this debate. Face it with courage and tell the people what is involved, because there is much more involved than just the pure Catholic position on marriage. That I respect; but I cannot, as a person who spent 15 years striving in a very difficult situation to promote a new concept of what we could all do together, ever tolerate absolute positions on moral questions in a Constitution made by Irish people.
