As Deputy Flanagan has said, and he and I have spent nearly the same amount of time in the House, great changes are taking place and have taken place. I think in his obviously very genuine and very sincere speech he spoke for the majority of the people in the country when he said that no matter what we do about Article 44 of the Constitution, the position of the Catholic Church in the hearts and minds of the people of Ireland will not be changed. That was really the main point which he quite rightly wanted to stress. Also, I think he did give some expression to a feeling of puzzlement, doubt and concern that the House should take time to bring in this Bill and to make this change in our Constitution. That puzzlement and doubt may be shared by a considerable section of the community because, while I have said and many people say that this is a relatively unimportant act in itself, there is no doubt whatever that taken in the time, not only nationally, in the context of the terrible struggle in the North, but also in the time of the great changes taking place within the Catholic Church throughout the world, this is going to be from now on a stressful period for many people within our society. Many of the values, many of the ideas, many of the immutable truths which we have been led to believe were sacrosanct and could not be changed are, I believe, faced with inevitable change.
To some extent Deputy Flanagan echoed the commonly held belief of the negligible quality of Article 44 in our society but, leaving aside the important consideration that the 1937 Constitution purported to apply to the Thirty-two Counties—and therefore it seems to me its inclusion in 1937 by Mr. de Valera was an extraordinary gratuitous act of provocation to the religious minority in the total community of Ireland— leaving that aside for the moment, we do know that the inclusion of Article 44 has been of importance in certain instances in our courts and also in certain instances in this House.
I suppose I should try to clear up my own personal position in this because over the years it has appeared that I have taken up a particular position myself in relation to the Catholic Church and the general impression created has been one of sustained hostility to the Catholic Church. I should like to make it clear that I am, I have tried to be all my political life, a social revolutionary and that as such I have never considered either political party or religious organisation or institution, trade union movement or any other group of people gathered together except in the context of their influence or their power to retard or to further social revolution and it is only in that context that I would presume to discuss or consider the influence of any particular religion.
I am not concerned with the religious belief held by anybody. I think it would be an impertinence to criticise the religious belief of anybody. Nothing could be farther from my political attitudes than to question anybody's right to hold any religious views they wished. My sole concern always has been to consider the religion, the political party, the trade union movement leader, political leaders, whoever they are, simply in the context of the power and influence they have had in the attempts by some of us fundamentally to change the structure of our society and to create a socialist society. That is the only concern that I have ever had.
It is inevitable because of the special position of the Catholic Church, to which Deputy Flanagan quite rightly referred, in the minds of the mass of our people that it has become a particularly influential institution. The social and political attitudes of that institution were therefore of paramount importance in the kind of social organisation created by the products of that institution.
I am one of the products of that institution. I suppose it is true to say that 99 per cent of us here, for historical and other reasons, are products of that religious institution. My only conflict, if conflict it is, is with its political and social manifestations and not at all with the exclusively religious quality of Catholicism. We would be doing the Catholic Church a disservice if we were to say that it had not been influential in creating the kind of society in which we now live. The Catholic Church controls our whole educational system. It certainly has done so in the past 50 years. It has had the function of educating or indoctrinating—this is simply an unkind word for it but is just as valid in its meaning—all of us, first of all the electorate, through the electorate the Deputies, through them the parties, the Cabinet, the Government and the social and economic organisations of our society.
That seems to be a logical assessment of the effect and influence of the Catholic Church and the part that it has played in our society. The reality is, as Deputy Flanagan said, that the mass of the people owe allegiance to this belief which has a very clear-cut social and political pattern and is given a special position in our Constitution and defined in our Constitution. That very fact has been used in this House in my hearing, to justify the particular social attitude of at least one Government—and perfectly correctly in my view. If it is given a special position, presumably it must be given a right to special consideration for whatever attitudes and views it holds. I do not agree with this process but it seems to me to follow that, if you give it this special position in a Constitution, you can then use it to argue that thereafter one's social attitudes must be determined by this Constitution.
The problem is not a simple one. Everything that Deputy Flanagan said about our attitude to the minority religions is correct. There have been isolated incidents, which I do not particularly wish to refer to, of bigotry and sectarianism. The minority here have been treated in many ways as a privileged minority. I do not think the minority have much cause to complain, but I do not think it is quite as simple as that. There is a free exercise of religion and, as Deputy Carter said, we always encourage them to come into public affairs.
We have to remember that the 1937 Constitution and every Act and every provision of that Constitution has always to be considered in the context of our declared ambition for a united Ireland. I remember talking to a Cardinal on one occasion and saying that the present Northern struggle was a sectarian one. He said it was a political one. Ireland is not divided at all. Geographically, it is a unit. That is a simple truth. People think we can unite our country by bringing the two parts together, but it is much more difficult to have a country divided on sectarian grounds, on religious grounds. Every debate that has ever taken place on a social, economic or moral issue should have taken place in the context of the declaration of all parties. All the parties say they are republican. The Labour Party, the Fine Gael Party and the Fianna Fáil Party are republican parties. We all want the unity of our people.
One has a perfect right to create what John Hume has called a confessional State if you want to, a strictly Salazar type of republic or a South American type Catholic sectarian republic if one wants to. If the people decide that is what they want they have a right to have it, but it seems to me totally illogical to expect that you can have this kind of sectarian State and at the same time pave the way for union with a group of people who are inalienably hostile and opposed to the religious views which the majority of the people in that sectarian State hold.
It is we who are constantly seeking unity. It is we who are constantly saying we want to be united to our separated brethren in the North. They do not want unity. The Unionists have never made any pretence to wanting a united Ireland but, in spite of all our protests, there have been successive enactments here which have been sectarian, giving privileges to the majority religion down here. We are perfectly within our right to do that if we wish to do so. But as a preparation for unity, it seemed to me extraordinary that a man of considerable intelligence like Mr. de Valera, who whatever other failings he may have had, was an extremely shrewd, able and talented politician, could have believed that this gratuitous act of provocation to the religious minority in our total society could have passed unnoticed and could have in any way reduced the inhibitions, to put it at its lowest and its mildest, which the Protestant minority had in joining a united Ireland. It completely astonishes me. The inclusion then of Article 41 and of Article 2, making this provision apply to the whole island were obviously again further acts of gratuituous provocation to the minority. Let us put those in if we want to—I cannot emphasise this too much—but to expect the Protestant minority to ignore or not to notice them or not to resent them seems to me to be a succession of acts of such extraordinary naivete as to amount to near imbecility and we see the end results of it around us today, in this extraordinary impenetrability of our people in the south of Ireland to understand that we have provoked this minority who we profess we want to join us in unity and harmony.
Deputy Flanagan was correct in all the things he said about the position of the minority but this is my interpretation of all that. I share his belief that there has been tolerance and understanding, the right to free practice of religion and an extraordinary generosity in all aspects of the life of a religious minority in the community, including, of course, the famous act of making Douglas Hyde, a Protestant and member of the minority, the first President—quite an adroit act, in my view. I believe it was considered that it may not have been but it was done, to make the other provisions of the Constitution more palatable to the Protestant minority. Leaving that aside, however, the record is good where the minority is concerned, but I think that one has to look at the Protestant minority in the South a little more carefully. I believe they have been given every facility to build their schools, to build their institutions, to provide for their hospitals, to provide for the university, Trinity being the main one, and to provide every facility they might want to have or might need—prima facie extraordinary generosity, considering the whole historical development of our country over centuries, with penal laws and all the terrible things which we as Catholics suffered in our own time.
Considering these, prima facie, our whole attitude has been remarkably generous and tolerant and compassionate and, I suppose, in Deputy Flanagan's description, Christian, but I think it is fair to suggest that, first of all, this is a tiny minority, which incidentally is getting tinier. I have some figures here showing pupils in schools as between 1950 and 1970 dropping from 11,000 to 10,000. I do not want to make too much of that but it is a falling minority, a very tiny minority, an unthreatening minority and also rather a special kind of minority, a predominantly wealthy minority. That, again, of course, is a mark in our favour, if I may speak as a member of the Catholic majority in the South in so far as we did not take their wealth, their property and their land from them so that the result is that they are predominantly a privileged minority. They own the great institutions of wealth, the banks and house money-lending societies, factories, industries, and so on. They continue to own these and considerable amounts of property.
For that reason, therefore, many of the disabilities which I see stemming from either constitutional or legal enactments here, they have been able to evade quite simply. If they want divorce, they go to Britain for it; if they want education which they like for their children, they send them to England for it; if they want to have family planning, contraception, there is no serious problem really.
The Ne Temere decree, the position of mixed marriages, was rather more difficult but if you take these points, the decision to impose the Catholic attitude in relation to family planning and contraception by the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, the Ne Temere decree upheld by the courts in the Tilson case, the matter of mixed marriages where the children must be Catholics—preferably that Protestants should not marry Catholics but if they do, the children must be Catholics— the denial of the right to divorce to those who conscientiously believe they have a right to divorce—all these disabilities could be largely overcome by the existing Protestant minority, but in a united Ireland—this is the important matter—the whole position changes completely and so the special position of the Catholic Church in regard to these matters which determined this kind of attitude in the courts and attitudes in this House becomes very much more important in the context of a united Ireland because then you have, first of all a significant, a frightening and threatening Protestant minority in the total community and predominantly within that significant Protestant minority, there are either working-class people or white collar workers, a relatively non-wealthy group, at any rate. You have then a completely different situation.
What we did, consciously or otherwise, during the last 50 years was to recognise the special position not only of the Catholic Church but of the Protestant minority, and to accept that because of their privileged position, of their wealth on the whole, they would not mind very much if we laid down some conditions for membership of that effective ghetto minority, because we told them: "You must not marry our children, you must go to school in our rigidly sectarian schools. If you marry our children, their children must be Catholics. If your marriage breaks down you cannot have divorce."
The whole process was one of separate development, rather on the lines of Vorster's separate development, except extremely paternalistic, extremely generous but, nevertheless, just as lethal in its isolation of the two communities. So, one in fact has in the South just as clear-cut a division between the Protestant minority and the Catholic majority as there is between the Catholic minority and the Protestant majority in the North. There are two partitions in Ireland, one in the North and one in the South.
So, as a preparation for a united Ireland we created here a well-off, well-educated, well fed and cared for Protestant minority here so long as they kept away from us, so long as they accepted their role in separate development in the South and did not miscegenate with the Catholic majority. If they did not accept this we stopped it by Ne Temere. That is one aspect of it but probably of even greater importance is the factor which determined the right of probably the most conservative Catholic Church in the world—there are many kinds of Catholic Church but the Irish Catholic Church, in its social attitudes over the years has been extremely conservative—to oppose by Catholic social teaching any attempt radically to change, even by reasonably moderate means, the social structure here, the old age pensions and other social benefits. We, accordingly, had a social vertical class structure in which 74 per cent of the property was held by 5 per cent of the people, the end product of the social policy of the Catholic Church here during 50 years. Extrapolate that to a united Ireland and what do we find? We find that our social services, health, education, care of old age, housing, social grants of one kind or another, are all very much lower—the latest trade union figures outlines them in great detail— than those paid in Northern Ireland.
Let me say we are doing the Catholic Church an injustice if we say she has not been influential in creating these enormous disparities which in my view, much more than the laws on contraception or Ne Temere, are the major obstacles to true unity. This was summed up for me quite recently. I was in the Newry march with some devout churchgoing working class people. You all know the circumstances of the march. It was very tense, very anxious and for people of their age it was quite a dangerous thing to be doing. They summed it up for me by saying: “Remember this afternoon we are not marching for a united Ireland. We are marching for civil rights.” They should not have said that because they should not have had to say it because it should not have been true. But it happens to be true.
I think that will be one of the defects in the referendum. If the Catholic Nationalists in the North get their civil rights, to which they have every right, then a referendum carried out in those circumstances, leaving no doubt in anybody's mind that whatever about the South being ready and prepared to pay the £300 million to £500 million per year mentioned in the Taoiseach's article in a German newspaper, the Catholic Nationalist in the North will vote with the Protestant Unionist. Gerry Fitt said the other day that he has more in common with Paisley or one of the others than he has with people down here.
I am trying to discuss this in the context of the situation in 1937 and the situation of crisis and possible civil war, and the role that has been played by our politicians here in the South over the years in taking action after action which together have led to a very clearcut, positive and completely justified reluctance on the part of the Northern Protestant Unionist and the intelligent Northern Catholic Nationalist to come together.
If I were the father of a family in the Six Counties I would vote against union with the South on the grounds of the lack of freedom of conscience and the gross defects in our social services, all of which have stemmed from the special position that the Catholic Church has held here since the State was founded. I know of no leader of any Government who professed to be republican from Mr. Cosgrave through Mr. de Valera, Mr. Lemass or the Taoiseach, Deputy Lynch, who has been prepared to subordinate his declared ambition and hope for a united Ireland to his prior loyalty to the Catholic Church.
Deputy Corish put it very well once when he said: "I am a Catholic first and an Irishman second." That goes for the vast majority of the politicians in this country during the past 50 years. I have no objection to that point of view except to say that at its mildest it is illogical in the context of those who say that they wish for peaceful unity with a significant sector of our society which differs from us on religious grounds in a deep and, it appears, irreconcilable way. Indeed, that attitude is totally hypocritical.
Often when watching the Taoiseach in action I realise the frighteningly difficult post that he holds. It is a post that I would not have for all the money in the world. The Taoiseach is head of the Government at a time when we all face very grave dangers because of the possibility of the breakdown of any existing control and of the spread of civil war both in the North and in the South. I do not underestimate the difficulties he faces. Sometimes I admire what I would consider the Chinese-like quality of his extraordinary patience but, on the other hand, I am astonished at the way in which at a time that he is asking for initiatives from Health and from the Northerners, his own reply is as minimal as this measure. There have been initiatives by way of the proroguing of Stormont and the issuing of the Green Paper.
I would not flatter myself by thinking that I see things more clearly, more patriotically or with greater insight than anybody else in this House, least of all the Taoiseach. Before we reach the stage at which we can enter into any serious discussion leading to a relaxation of the appalling hatred that exists between Catholics and Protestants there are many matters to be put right. The fears of both communities are very real and in my opinion entirely justifiable on the record. I am sure they will defend their beliefs in the same way as would the people about whom Deputy Flanagan spoke —the majority who profess the Catholic faith. For that majority the deletion of Article 44 will not lessen the special position that the church holds for them. Those Protestant people in the North who are frightened of us and of our religious, social and moral convictions and who hate us because of these convictions will fight us if we try to impose our convictions on them. In their fears and their sense of insecurity they would act as would a Catholic majority down here threatened with what they believed could be a complete take-over by some Protestant majority from the North.
The deletion of Article 44 is only of relative importance. The leader of the Labour Party has said that the Taoiseach will have the support of this party in dealing with the major measures in the Constitution which should be changed—Articles 2 and 41 —and also the amendment of the Criminal (Amendment) Act relating to contraception. I hope that the Taoiseach will accept the need for changes in all these matters in addition to accepting the need for improving all our social services—health, education, housing and so on. All these matters would have to be put right before we could go honourably either to the Northern Protestant Unionists or to the Northern Catholic Nationalists and tell them that should they come into a united Ireland they would not become second class citizens in a fifth-rate society.
