The point which seems central to me in this debate, and certainly which is cardinal to the Bill before the House and the legislation which it proposes to amend, is that we are talking about criminal law. No amount of references to health, family planning, caring this and compassionate that, will obscure the fact that criminal law is at the centre of the stage in this subject. The reason for that is that in the area of contraception, as in other areas, the Irish State has taken on itself to limit what is essentially the citizen's right to do exactly as he pleases within the four corners of law. It has taken on itself to limit the citizen's right to do as he pleases and to enforce that limitation by a threat of criminal punishment.
Essentially, what this Bill proposes to do is to relax that threat of criminal punishment in certain cases. I am not going to follow Deputies, on whichever side of this issue they have spoken, down the question of abortion statistics, promiscuity statistics and the collapse of society as we know it, or, for that matter, the points of view, which have their own validity, which my colleague, Deputy Fennell, was advancing here a moment ago and which other Deputies have advanced and will advance in the future. My main concern is and has been since 1974 — so that anything I say now will not come as a surprise to those who watch what Deputies say — that central, from my point of view, is the issue of the extent of the criminal law and the entitlement of the criminal law to encroach on people's privacy.
No State that I know of attempts to make its criminal law co-extensive with the moral injunctions which most of society might be willing to recognise. Nobody wants to live in states or communities which have attempted to do that in the past, like the puritan communities of New England. Perhaps there are Deputies here who would be afraid to say so, but let me say that I do not want to live in a community like that. I do not want to raise a scare about it, because I do not see any danger that this country is going to turn into such a thing. On the contrary, the trend is all in the opposite direction. I just mention the puritan New England communities in order to suggest to the House that the day when a State — and there were very few even then — attempted to enforce its perceived morality by means of criminal law, by means of judge and jailer — and yes, gallows — has passed away. I do not think that anybody — Catholic, Protestant, Jew or Presbyterian — regrets that.
Every State accepts that the function of criminal law is a good deal humbler than the function of moral code. A moral code is transmitted ideally by example, by parents to children and, in a parallel manner, by Churches or Confessions to their members. It necessarily has wider frontiers, much wider boundaries than has criminal law, though it is not easy to see where the boundary is to be placed. I have not a set of rules of thumb, nor has anybody, for suggesting where one is to stake out the boundary which will shut the criminal law off from certain areas of existence. I have not got such a rule of thumb, and attempts to set up such a rule of thumb have uniformly failed. Even if there were such clear boundaries they would shift from age to age and from generation to generation. Wherever the boundaries between criminal law and morality lie there are certain dictates of prudence which the State ought to respect and there are certain values in human dignity which a State ought to respect, which will have a restraining influence on the protrusion of criminal law into areas which might perhaps be sufficiently regulated by the group's social mores or religiously transmitted morality. These values are not slight. A State which takes it upon itself to enforce something which it is not able to enforce is making itself ridiculous and making its law ridiculous. For an example of this we do not have to go any further than the Fianna Fáil Bill which this Bill proposes to amend.
I was quoted in a newspaper recently as saying something at a Fine Gael party meeting which I did not bother to contradict, party because meetings are supposed to be in private and partly because it was a trivial thing anyway. I got so many people writing to me saying that they understood I had said this and that they heartily agreed with it, that I want to explain what I would have meant had I said it. I was reported as saying that there was no public demand for this Bill. There is a certain amount of truth in that. I have heard of no demand for anything of the kind but the reason why there is no strong public demand for it is that the present law is a farce and it is disobeyed wholesale. People can do without the law one way or the other in this area. A former student of mine wrote to the paper the other day to contradict what he had seen attributed to me as an opinion though in fact I had never said it and he said that all that Deputy Kelly need do was stroll 500 yards from his office to find a huge demand which is actually being supplied. That demand is supplied so far as I am aware in defiance of the law. That is what I mean by an unworkable law — one which the State does not mean to police and cannot police. The State does not give a damn whether it will ever be policed but it enables it to sit smugly back with its hands folded over its stomach and say "We have done our duty by the youth of this country". That is the kind of law we had here five years ago and if the Minister did nothing else but show that up I would support him for it.
It is important for the State to keep in mind what it is capable of getting away with in enforcement, and what it is capable of policing, or what it could reasonably expect to police without carrying out instrusions into family and individual personal life, so shocking and so intolerable as to destroy the dignity of individuals and of society. There have been states like that in the past. We do not need to go any further than Nazi Germany where the state intruded into the fireside by requiring the son who was a member of the Hitler Youth to report his parents for politically disloyal sentiments. The Nazis did not believe in half measures. They went right into the fireside and broke up families to ensure political loyalty. Most states do not conduct their affairs like that and would not be tolerated by free men if they did. That is one criterion which should inhibit the State in trying to impose any rule whether founded on morality or otherwise. The other value to be protected is the value of individual personal privacy which has now come more or less to be recognised by the Irish courts as a dimension of the citizen's personal right. In relation to this, nobody can lay down an absolute limit. Clearly, I do not have individual privacy so impregnable that I can refuse to disclose my affairs to the income tax people. There are many other areas where the State's legitimate concerns will breach my privacy but there is no doubt that we all know what is meant by individual liberty and we have a rough calculus of when we feel somebody is going too far in poking his nose into somebody else's business. Nose poking, is what this law is all about. It is the intrusion by the State into private lives. It has nothing to do with morality. My objection to it has nothing to do with not sharing the moral points of view with which it starts out. It has everything to do with believing that the State has exceeded what should be its true measure in the way it has done this for the last 50 years.
In case anyone thinks what I am saying is shocking I would draw the attention of the House to this. Like other Deputies of my party I have had a particularly large number of letters probably associated with the fact that a small number of us publicly said we would vote "Yes" on the pro-life amendment. I do not apologise for that. In doing so I was only doing what I had told the people on the doorsteps. In the 1982 election my party were committed to doing it. I will not rake up that history, but I did it partly for that reason and partly because I thought that a rebuttal to that amendment, unnecessary though it was, would have an unsettling and destablishing effect in regard to what should be the people's consensus on the sanctity of life both before and after birth, where it is not sufficiently respected here. That may be the reason why some of us have had an unusually heavy post. My post is to me a very politically unsettling one. I have had upwards of 150 letters of all kinds, the great majority from my constituency; the great majority of them urge me to defy my party, to abandon them and vote the other way. I am grateful to those people for having uniformly addressed me temperately. I have had no trace of abuse or intimidation.
Any of the people who did me the honour of writing to me to put their points of view politely and reasonably must have known that it is 11 years since I said something of this kind in the House, when Deputy Cooney's Bill was going through. In case anyone is shocked by this, there are several areas of what I might call sexual irregularity which are not crimes at all and some never were crimes here. For example, ordinary fornication is not a crime; adultery is not a crime; the act of prostitution is not a crime; it is not a crime to take money for sexual services. There all kinds of offences associated with prostitution which are an attempt to keep it within bounds — the offence of soliciting, living on immoral earnings and so on — but the act itself is not an offence. The reason these things are not an offence is that the State considers that it would be beyond them to enforce a criminal law in that area. I would ask Deputies who think otherwise, do they suppose that this means that the State is condoning immorality in this area? Do they suppose that merely because the State does not send the police around to see who is misbehaving sexually with whom, that this is a sign that it is a matter of indifference to the State and that the State is condoning it or sponsoring it? Of course it does not mean that. It simply means that the State for a mixture, no doubt, of the motives I have mentioned regards it as impossible to police such an area and that it is best left to individual perceptions and individual intuitions of morality.
There are a whole stream of immoral imperfections, some of them very serious, which a confessor would regard morally serious, which are not criminally punishable either. The whole field of domestic tyranny, not to speak of cruelty, does not come within the purview of criminal law unless it amounts to assault, or cruelty to children in a statutorily appraisable sense. The whole gamut of meanness, of falseness, of speculation, of profiteering, of backbiting, of ingratitude and so on is not a crime and no one in their senses would think of making them a crime because in order to pursue such offences the State would have to recruit a police of an elaborateness not seen since the world began and would have to reduce the private lives of its citizens to a zero. Cardinal Ó Fiaich and many of the bishops have missed this. In a rhetorical address the other day Cardinal Ó Fiaich said that no legislation passed by the State could make artificial contraception morally right.
I do not know what other Deputies may feel about this and therefore I will not go into it now, but I say with respect that the Cardinal's utterance is beside the point. This Bill does not purport to make artificial contraception morally correct. It does not set out to do this. It withdraws the criminal law, not entirely but very largely and substantially, from the area of contraception. I hope this will not come as a subject of amazement to anybody, but the Bill proposes in a nutshell to restore the law pretty much to the condition it was in when Cardinal Ó Fiaich was a schoolboy, and most of his fellow bishops.
Though it has not been emphasised in the House, until 1935 we had no such law on our Statute Book; and in the childhood of Deputy Oliver Flanagan and even in the lifetime of Deputy O'Hanlon, it was no offence in Mountmellick or in Carrickmacross to import contraceptive devices for one's own use or for sale to others, whatever the person's marital status. That is an amazing thing. "We never knew that", people will be saying. "That is a new one on us. I thought we always had a strict law about this."
We had not. We did not have a strict law about these things until 1935, and that law skulked through the House, almost because Deputies were afraid to say anything in favour or against it in case they might have to use a word which was unacceptable according to the standards of the time. All we are doing — we are not even doing that because up to then the thing was subject to almost no regulation at all except that advertising contraceptives was prohibited by the 1929 Censorship Act — is bringing the law back part of the way to what it was when the older generation now were first frisking around the Irish Free State.
I would ask if it is therefore the case that we should picture the Irish Free State in the years before 1935 as a scene of the horrors Deputy Flanagan portrayed here the other day, and likely to emerge if the Bill becomes law. Was the Irish Free State the scene of licentiousness as gross as we have been led to apprehend? Of course, I will be told that is a disingenuous and rhetorical question because we all know the world has changed and that Ireland has changed since 1935.
Indeed it has, but that has a lesson for us because if Ireland has changed since 1935 it has done so in spite of the most complete zareba, in spite of a Maginot Line of the most defensive legislation ever to appear in Western Europe, with the possible exception of Portugal or Spain. One could lump in with the whole of North Europe a large part of the rest of the world. Ireland has changed in spite of the laws against contraception and on censorship. The latter were so ludicrous in their operation that even Fianna Fáil finally found the courage to amend them. Ireland has changed despite the constitutional prohibition on divorce.
I do not need to labour the point that Ireland was not a hotbed of licentiousness before the 1935 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act closed the floodgates. We all know that is not the case and if it looks like becoming the case now it is because all that has taken place despite all the ingenuity of legislation to stop it. I do not want to be taken as avoiding a point that could be made against me at this juncture. Although we are not doing so in this Bill, we might appear to be running ahead, to be winching down the gates a little faster than the flood is building up on the outside.
That might appear to be likely to accelertate our approach to the world norm, but whether we like it or not we are nearer to the world norm now than we were ten or 15 years ago, for better or for worse. There is no use in our deploring it. Many of us do not like the kind of society we now have. There are about 100 reasons why one might not like it, depending on one's disposition, including what we are talking about now. In many respects we have moved nearer to the world norm and the question is whether, if we pass this Bill, we will accelerate that approach, whether we will even up the waters between this canal basin which we have been occupying for the past 60 years and the rather higher waters outside.
I admit that is a fair point and I cannot contradict it. I will not start deploying statistics to produce a table to prove the increase in the number of illegitimacies or abortions and say that all this happened contemporaneously with something else. That would not prove it happened as a consequence of that other thing. Such an argument is hard to rebut. It is hard to be sure that we are not accelerating the thing, but my feeling is that whether we had this Bill or not or whether the Bill will be defeated or not, Ireland will move nearer to the world norm.
To use a figure of speech which I did not invent but of which I would have been glad to be the father, not only can we not stop the world from turning but we cannot stop ourselves from turning with it. That leaves the State, the Government and the Dáil with a net question: is the entirely problematical, entirely speculative chance of perhaps retarding our approach to the world norm a sufficient justification for continuing to maintain a very substantial inroad on personal and family privacy? Everybody must answer that question as they see best themselves. I think the answer is no, because I start from the intuitive conviction that this area of life essentially is so intimate that the State has no business poking its nose into it. Everybody will have their convictions about that, and I respect the sincerity and the reasonableness found among those such as Deputy Glenn, who does not agree with me, and Deputy Flanagan. My conviction is that this area of life is so intimate that the State should keep out of it unless it has compelling reasons for interfering.
A compelling reason is the protection of young people — I will be back to this in a moment. In the meantime, I will deal with one other argument or form of rhetoric which has accompanied attacks on this Bill not just on the other side but from outside and from many people who write to me and, let me not put a tooth on it, who have told me they have always voted No. 1 for me or have always supported Fine Gael. They have intimated that their allegiance to me and to Fine Gael will be somewhat on the line if this Bill goes through.
I would be very sorry if the consequences which they apprehend from the Bill were to come to pass and I would then be anxious to support measures to try to mend the damage. However, I do not think we are paid here to express opinions that we do not hold. I do not think we are paid here to express the opinions of others. I think we are paid to express the ideas we hold ourselves. My perception of this area is that it is something too private for the State to be allowed interfere with.
One of the items of rhetoric deployed by the opponents of the Bill involves an accumulation of evils. One finds in the same breath contraception, divorce, and abortion being mentioned just as was the case in the pro-life referendum debate two years ago. It is my view that those things are perfectly separate. I announced to the House the position I took up during the pro-life referendum debate and I got a lot of congratulatory letters — though nothing like as many as the admonitory ones I have now got — from people who were glad I had taken the line I did. Those letters came from people from inside and outside my constituency. Many of them, I gathered from the way they wrote even of those who were pleased with what I had done two years ago, were inclined to say that unless the referendum was passed we would have a whole train of other things including these other objectionable matters which seemed to belong together in their minds. Of course they are perfectly separate.
The State is right to treat abortion as a criminal offence. I say that not in any way meaning to imply that there is not to be a lot of understanding for someone who is driven by despair, abandonment and one thing or another into that crime but it should remain a criminal offence. I have no doubts in my mind about that but I cannot see how that conviction requires me to criminalise contraception. I cannot see how one follows logically from the other although many of my correspondents seems to think that those two things belong together. Indeed, there is a point of view — I will express it myself because I think that logically it is not entirely sound — that will say that a State which forbids abortion is logically obliged not to impede a precaution which, even though one might have moral doubts about it, at the very least will tend in the case of the individual to avert a pregnancy which will expose an unborn being either to the danger of destruction before birth or of growing up in a very hostile and unfavourable environment afterwards. That point of view exists. I do not wish to overlook the objection to it and I know that Deputy Glynn who has never spoken with anything except courtesy in this matter will be the last to be putting opinions into my mouth which she knows I do not hold. I accept that there is an objection to that point of view namely, that if one were to take all wraps off promiscuity even with contraception the net result would be more pregnancies and not fewer. I am inclined to think that that is so and the figures in England show it but whether those figures have anything to do with the availability of contraception or not, whether they would be there anyway even if contraception was forbidden, is the problem I cannot get any kind of a conclusive answer to.
I should like to say one more thing about the right to privacy. The House ought to consider that it is bound by Article 15 to enact nothing which is contrary to the Constitution. As I understand the way the law has functioned under the 1979 Act it is the case that non-medical contraceptive devices are prescribed by doctors and that the medical profession very much resent this. I do not need to make the medical profession's case for it but there is more to it than merely the question of doctors being a bit upset because they are asked to do something which is not really the job of a doctor. There is also the question of whether it is not a gross violation of a family's privacy that they are obliged to resort to a doctor in order to get the doctor to prescribe for them in an area which is not a medical area. Therefore, those people are obliged to disclose to an outsider who in this context is perfectly irrelevant the most intimate details of their life in order to achieve a facility which is non-medical. They are obliged to disclose those details in a context in which the doctor does not have any function whatever to advise them. By definition a doctor cannot advice them about a non-medical preparation.
To me that is a breach of privacy. That marital privacy is breached by the 1979 Act. I believe that if that point were taken along the lines Mrs. McGee took her case it would have a very good chance of success. I will go further than that, although this necessarily is more speculative, and say that I would not be inclined to put much money on the proposition that the Supreme Court would not declare in this area a right of privacy for the individual also, whatever his or her marital status. There can be no certainty about that but I should like to direct the attention of the House to the fact that in 1983 in the Norris case two of the five judges pronounced very strong judgments in favour of the concept, and the deployment of the concept in that case, of individual privacy in the area of intimate relations. That pair of judges, who are still on the court, were outvoted by the other three but I think it is an open question — I will not go any further than that — whether in some kind of legal context which was not so unmentionable as the Norris case that majority would hold up apart from the fact that one of the three judges has now left the court and been replaced. It is questionable whether that majority would hold up, and it is a perfectly open point on which I would not like to risk money either way, that the court might in a setting like this, irrespective of marital status, come to the conclusion that to subject this area to prescription was an intrusion on individual privacy.
If the House rejects the Bill there is a very good chance that just as the Fianna Fáil Government found themselves overtaken by the McGee case in 1972-73, we will find ourselves passed out once again by the Supreme Court. Whether that would be to the honour of the House and to the honour of Irish democracy or whether it would merely allow us to hug ourselves at having been spared individually a lot of odium, a lot of telephone calls and a lot of letters I will not pronounce on. Deputies are here to speak their minds, do what they think is right and not to shelter behind what may come along in the form of a Supreme Court ruling.
I should like to express two serious reservations about the Bill. One of them, I am afraid, is now only academic but the other the Minister could do something about and I honestly urge him to do so. The first reservation bears on the age of 18. I accept the Minister's point that that age limit as he has devised it will not be a national joke in the way that the 18 age limit in the case of supplying drink in a public house is concerned because, as he has pointed out repeatedly, there is an absolute liability on a chemist or whoever it is to make sure that the person being supplied is 18 or over. A publican, in order to be caught by the law, has to be shown to have knowingly supplied drink to a minor but in this case the word "knowingly" does not occur so that nobody can escape the penalty the Minister is providing for an unauthorised dispensation by saying that he or she did not know the boy or girl was under 18.
I accept the Minister's point and so far as an age limit is workable at all — even that is arguable — I accept he has gone as far as he could. My concern is more with the age 18 itself because I do not think 18 is an age at which people should be permitted, encouraged or facilitated to enter into serious relationships, including the marriage relationship. I do not think it is an age at which they should be facilitated or encouraged in the formation of casual relationships from which serious results may follow. I hope Members do not think, having heard the first part of my speech, that this is an unduly square opinion. It will not come as a surprise to any person who follows the proceedings of the House because I said this last November when we were passing, for the most trivial of reasons as they seemed to me then, the Age of Majority Bill. It is the passage by the House of that Bill which makes me feel that it is probably a waste of breath for me to say this now.
When that Bill was going through I said, among other things, that if we passed the Bill and the age of majority was reduced from 21 to 18 we would be knocking out of our own hands a powerful weapon for arguing, should such a thing later become necessary or opportune, that 18 was too young an age for access to contraceptive devices.
We have been depriving ourselves of that argument. We have been logically incapacitating ourselves from putting up that argument. I think I was the only Deputy in the House to object to this reduction in the age of majority. I was, I will not say laughed out of it; I was not treated impolitely — not that I would not have been well used to it if I had been — I was politely laughed out of it, let me put it that way, by Deputies on the far side, including Deputy Mary O'Rourke who told me that she had much more confidence in young people than I had, who told me I was looking on the gloomy side. Both she and I are the parents of more or less grown up children and we both, I think, know what we are talking about. I do not claim to be any better at it, probably worse than she is; I accept that she knows what she is talking about but her perspective was a different one. Young people, she said, can be trusted; they are not as lightheaded and as feather-brained as Deputy Kelly thinks; he has got far too gloomy a view of them. The same kind of tone was taken by, I think, Deputy Fahey — I did not remain for too much more of the debate but essentially I was a lone voice in here in maintaining that 18 is too young to get married, for anything that will facilitate marriage, such as the ostensible reason for that stupid Bill, such as the facilitation of a mortgage. It follows from that that I also think it is too young for entering into casual relationships which can have extremely serious consequences which can last for the rest of one's life as can marriage.
I am sorry that the chance of arguing this has passed because, of course, it is not possible to advance this argument any longer, to say now 18 is too young — even though this is the very emotive point which Deputy Glenn and those who think like her have quite rightly latched on to — in the form of saying we are facilitating the supply of contraceptives to teenagers. I agree with Deputy Glenn about that but, if so, we did that damage here three months ago. It is not possible any longer to press the Minister to apply what I would have preferred, namely, the old measure of maturity, 21 years, to this area. I would have been happy enough with an age limit of 21, completely happy with it, but I think 18 is too young. I have children of my own who are just above and below that age. I feel I know what I am talking about and I would not wish them to get into that kind of situation which we are led to expect to fear. But I am afraid that the argument based on the level of the age limit has crumbled in our hands and we ourselves crumbled it up here in our hands three months ago.
Before I leave the subject of the 18 year old majority and our making statutory adults out of 18 year olds — the ones about whom we are now crying because they are not fit to be treated as adults and I agree they are not — then why did we make them adults here three months ago? Naturally we would not have done that, Sir, — and I know you have heard this so often you hardly need to wait for me to say it — except for the example which we so slavishly awaited and then so blindly followed from Britain. Needless to say if the English had still thought fit to retain a 21 year age of maturity we would be damned but we would not find one too; there would be some little reason we would find for delaying a change downwards. It is the English we have to thank for that. I should say that the English cannot be blamed for what they think right for themselves but we can be blamed for slavishly imitating them.
My second reservation relates to the question of State involvement. Most of the letters I received expressed what I might describe as a generalised outrage about this Bill. But a few of them, a respectful handful — they were coming in such volume I could not be certain to have read every line of all of them — made what I think is a very substantial point. It is this: not only did they feel that the State was facilitating licence or promiscuity but they felt this Bill would have the effect of getting the State to subsidise it, to support it actively. It is not easy to see the substance of that point but it is there and I sympathise with it. If I felt indignant at the idea of single people being given access to contraceptives — which I do not feel indignant about because, as I said before, it is none of the State's business — I would feel deeply outraged, as I believe does Deputy Glenn, at the idea that the State was actually going to subsidise this which, even if only marginally, it does in the form of supplying them through health institutions run by regional health boards and hospitals which equally depend on public money. Every Government ought to recognise another rule of prudence apart from the one I mentioned earlier.
I mentioned earlier the rule of prudence not to attempt the impossible, or the unpoliceable. A further rule of prudence is: do not antagonise, do not switch off, do not make enemies of your own people; do not do a violence to their feelings greater than you feel to be absolutely necessary and indispensable in order that you achieve the object you believe is right. If a Government can reconcile or accommodate dissenting opinion — only, of course, where that opinion is sincerely held; I do not mean where it is just cooked up for political motivation — where a Government can, without violence to its main objective accommodate, reconcile, assuage dissenting opinion, it ought to do so.
What I would like the Minister to do, and would support him in doing, would be — and it would not affect the chemist shops or privately run or privately financed family planning clinics and so on — to give exceptional treatment to the State-supported outlets he envisages here, permitting those outlets to supply non-medical contraceptives to married people only. That is a small gesture. It would not wreck the Minister's Bill. It would go some distance, though perhaps not far enough, to reconcile and meet half way the perfectly sincere and very strongly held opinions of Deputies like Deputy Glenn and I suppose some of the Deputies on the far side of the House and which are held by quite a lot of people in the country. I would urge the Minister to consider whether he can go some distance, perhaps along the lines I suggest, at least to removing from his Bill the reproach that the State is actually subsidising or providing a facility which a taxpayer, perhaps a violently objecting taxpayer, has to contribute to in the provision of devices which are regarded as objectionable and which the State is wrongly regarded as having a role in keeping out of people's reach.
The last two points I want to make before concluding bear on the Church and State dimension to this controversy — on which I will not spend long — and on the role of the Opposition. I should like to echo something which my former colleague, Mr. Richie Ryan said yesterday — the suggestion made in recent weeks that the Catholic bishops are somehow wrong in speaking their minds on this point, or even in concerting an orchestrated sequence of pronouncements is a suggestion which never should be heard in a democratic State. The bishops, I think, have the wrong end of the stick in assuming that the State should legislate by means of the criminal law in this area. I think they are wrong about that. But they are absolutely entitled to speak their minds. I cannot understand how anyone can begrudge a Catholic bishop something he would not begrudge to a Protestant bishop, would not begrudge to a communist, would not begrudge to a newspaper editor, would not begrudge to anyone else in the country. I cannot understand that.
I disagree with them about this, I think they have got the wrong end of the stick. I think — as I shall hint in a moment — they are imprudent in taking the line they have taken if it is not an impertinence for me to offer a view like that. But their right to do all this is absolutely clear. The question whether it is sensible for them to have entered into this controversy in the form and with the intensity that they have is a separate question. It is not really a political question, I suppose, but let me just say a word about it. I do not think that the Catholic Church in this country is the same organisation that it was when I was a student when the mother and child scheme was being debated and even later when the Fethard-on-Sea boycott was taking place and things like that were happening. It is an organisation which undoubtedly commands a huge and reverential following in this country. Perhaps that is because the people can see no other organ in the State for which they feel the faintest regard or respect. It is easy to blame them for taking what bishops say seriously when they have so little reason to take seriously much of what they hear in here? But their standing no longer depends on authority in the old fashioned sense. It no longer depends on belting people with croziers. It may once upon a time have depended on that.
Once upon a time it was the case that it was dangerous for a politician to step too far out of line with what the Catholic Church required. Those days have utterly passed away. I know there may be corners of the country where that is not apparent. I will not expand on this but there are corners of the country in which it is not apparent that the institutional authority, in the hardest sense of the word, of the Church has not yet dissolved. However, I believe, broadly speaking, that it has dissolved and it does not require any courage to dissent from the bishops these days and no courage to attack them. It may require a lot of courage to defend them, and at times they require defence. Their position with the people no longer depends on the crozier or authority, still less on anything like spiritual tyranny; it depends on the respect and the affection which the Church here has earned over the years, the decades and the centuries.
If I may voice the respectful view of a very low grade Catholic, I think they would be much wiser to depend on that affection and respect for their pastoral effects rather than on what might be interpreted as the exercise of authority. That would be more prudent, and particularly so in a case like this where it is so easy to interpret their intervention as an effort to shackle the secular arm on to a theological engine. It is very easy to represent what has happened here in the last couple of weeks as an attempt to get the arm of the State operative in support of a theological proposition. That is a position which it is unwise for a Church to get itself into. It has already caused a lot of difficulty in quarters which are, no doubt, predictable. It is especially unwise in this case when this country is nearly, if not absolutely, unique among countries with mainly Catholic populations in having the kind of laws which we have in this area. I cannot think of any Catholic country — perhaps Spain and Portugal may have done so until their respective revolutions — which enforces a particular moral view in the area of contraception by means of criminal measures.
The most conspicuously Catholic country in the world in recent years has been Poland; and I take it for granted, since the Polish Government is composed of Marxist atheists, that there is nothing in Poland analogous to the Criminal Law Jurisdiction Act, 1935. Looking at it, perhaps from an ignorant perspective, there seems to be no lack of vitality in the Church which Cardinal Glemp leads and I cannot see any sign of corruption or degradation among the Polish Catholic people. In fact, if the evidence, which admittedly tends to be displayed in political settings, is anything to go by, the reverse is the truth. I wonder whether the Irish people, even in present conditions and even for so long as they have the beautific enjoyment of Deputy Haughey's Act, would produce displays of spontaneous fidelity to their Church and carry them through in the face of governmental opposition and disapproval as widespread as has been seen in Poland in the last few years. I offer that view with humility, although I know some of my audience will not believe that possible. I am not a close follower of Church affairs and I may have got quite a wrong impression of this question in so far as other countries are concerned, but these reflections are made in the certainty that clerical intervention here will be misinterpreted and that we are virtually unique in the Catholic world in having laws of this kind. This leads me to think that it might have been more prudent for the Church to address its people through parish pulpits and through its ordinary medium of spiritual leadership rather than through formal episcopal statements, although I defend the right of the bishops to make them and reject the criticisms which have been levelled at them for opening their mouths about anything.
I am getting a bit tired of reading that frequently heard and glib suggestion that it is the duty of an Opposition to oppose. Of course, in a sense it is. It is paid by the people to oppose that which it judges deserves opposition; but it is not a maxim which can be taken literally because, if it were, no Bill, no stage or section of a Bill, no question, motion, estimate or resolution would go through this House without opposition, votes and conflict. The few Deputies that are here know that that is not so and that measures are waved through regularly. We had an example this afternoon although I admit the circumstances were very special. Deputy Tunney knows that many measures go though without provoking opposition from the Opposition.
Their own reports of the Fianna Fáil Party meeting on the subject held last week or the week before agree that the party leader said — if I am wrong about this, Deputy Tunney will put me right, as he would say himself, quam celerrime— that whatever about the rights and wrongs of this Bill — this was in answer to Deputies who had voiced general agreement with what the Bill was trying to do — he saw in this Bill a chance of unhorsing the Government, of embarrassing and demoralising them and, ultimately, of breaking them up. Even that is a legitimate, political ploy. If I think that a Government are unconditionally a disaster, which was my opinion all through the time when Deputy Haughey sat over here, I certainly would take any course consonant with keeping the law and not doing anything false, treacherous or dishonourable to put them out.
However, there are exceptions to that rule and one is where the national interest on balance is likely to be more injured by the Opposition acting rigidly and opposing everything, just for the sake of doing so, if as a result the Government are frustrated in what they are doing, than if it forbears to offer that much opposition. This case is a direct consequence of the inter-position of a whole row of bishops. One of our cant phrases is that the North is our first national problem and that the destruction of the Border — by peaceful means, of course — is our first national objective. Even the opinions — contemptible though they may be in some respects — of the majority in the North have to be of some little interest. They are gleefully saying to one another: "Look at your men below. The bishops have them again". That need not have been the case if the bishops had stayed clear of this controversy, but it has become the case and has given a kind of edge to this confrontation which otherwise might not have been there. Even though it has not influenced anything I said in the debate up to this — I still have the same opinions — it makes me extra apprehensive about the national results if this Bill is defeated. What will Deputy Tunney say the next time he goes to Bodenstown? Will he be able to hold his head up if this Bill is defeated? If every Orangeman from Limavady to Newry is cheering because it is demonstrated once again that his forefathers were right and that the Roman Church will do down any democratic government, how will Deputy Tunney say that he took part in that result? Without being rhetorical or wounding at the expense of Deputy Tunney, I appeal to the Fianna Fáil Deputies who have expressed either agreement or a lack of disagreement with this measure not to oppose it and not to incur the reproach of having driven yet another wedge between us and the Protestant population in the North. I ask them not to hand the Unionists yet another stick with which to belabour the Nationalist cause. I ask them not to oppose this Bill, but I do not ask them to cross the lobby. By having the courage of their convictions they will do more than ensure the passage of this Bill; they will bring a breath of spring into the House and a new season in which we may have a chance, which I hope for always, of a new climate and a new growth.
