THERE are good ideas and bad ideas and truly awful ideas.And no, I don't mean Donie Cassidy's suggestion that we should drive on the right-hand side of the road for the convenience of tourists while the same tourists have to observe a different speed-limit.
I mean the Archbishop of Canterbury's belief that "aspects" of the Muslim sharia law should and will be introduced into Britain.
In fairness to Rowan Williams, he doesn't want to bring in stoning to death for adultery or chopping off hands for theft. He is talking about things like divorce settlements.
But he is hopelessly wrong. Normally a chorus of condemnation tempts me to take the side of the person being pilloried. This time, however, the victim deserves every stinging comment, every slight on his intelligence and common sense.
He cannot have given any thought to the consequences of his remarks. They made themselves felt as soon as the words were out of his mouth. They delighted extreme Muslims, who would like to go much further and impose their laws on everybody else. And they comforted the wildest opponents of multi-culturalism, who can now present them as the thin end of a wedge. So far from easing community relations in Britain, they will do enormous damage.
Dr Williams is a liberal. On this side of the water, we are more accustomed to seeing feet in conservative clerical mouths. Intriguing that churchmen of both kinds misunderstand so much about law, history and society.
In Europe, not all that long ago, church and state were pretty much the same thing. Henry VIII thought so. He made himself supreme head of the Church of England. If you stayed loyal to the Pope or liked the teachings of Martin Luther, he might have you burned alive. A Papist and a Protestant might be dragged to their horrible deaths on the same hurdle.
The 18th-century Enlightenment put an end to all that. Not everywhere, though. Not in the Papal states. Not in Ireland where, less than two centuries ago, British laws penalised the majority Catholic population. When we became independent, we rejected the notion of a state religion. But the leaders of the once-persecuted Catholic Church wanted to behave like pre-Enlightenment, pre-Reformation princes.
Right down to the 21st century, in addition to the laws of our own State another law was imposed on most of us, the Roman canon law. Politicians cringed when bishops waved their croziers. The most cunning among them thought they had pulled a masterstroke when they opposed contraception, divorce and abortion.
They failed to realise that the war had been lost before they ever engaged in any of those battles. Long before the Liberal Agenda controversies, long before the sex abuse scandals, as far back as the 1960s, the contraception revolt fatally undermined the authority and credibility of the Church.
Nevertheless, it took a very long time to force the clergy to forfeit the privileges they had enjoyed, openly or secretly, for generations. Not until the 21st century did a justice minister assert bluntly that canon law cannot prevail over the law of the land. This was Michael McDowell, more skilful as a lawyer than as a politician.
In Britain, meanwhile, they held on to their monarchy and their Established Church. But the more enlightened bishops found their position embarrassing as well as anomalous. They had other embarrassments: schisms and threatened schisms over gay clergy and women priests. They were divided on lines rather similar to those in Ireland, but they did not really have the Irish choice, to retreat into authoritarianism. They dashed to the liberal side. On the way there, Archbishop Williams lost the run of himself.
Authoritarianism is out of date, but his particular version of liberalism is wholly misguided and out of touch, as far out of touch as the antiquated views of Cardinal Desmond Connell.
First, you cannot have one law for Muslims (or Catholics or Protestants or Jews) and another for everybody else. We live in a secular society. And in any case the courts -- Irish, British or European -- would never tolerate it.
Secondly, Dr Williams ought to know that there is a world of difference between Hasnat Khan, eminent surgeon and one-time lover of Princess Diana, and an illiterate Bangladeshi girl, who probably cannot even speak English, in an arranged marriage. What faint chance she has of asserting her rights depends on the English law and the English courts.
And that brings me to a point far more important than doomed efforts to return to an earlier age, or to open the door to new and deplorable forms of discrimination.
If immigrant communities in a developed country want to retain their language, customs, ceremonies -- in short, their culture -- good luck to them. But what they need most, and what the host societies need most, is assimilation. The Paris riots, and the shocking discovery that young Muslims brought up in Britain had engaged in suicide bombings, marked dreadful failures of assimilation. Will Ireland learn from the mistakes of other countries? The signs are not good. We already have all-black schools.
Roy Hattersley, one of the most considerable British Labour politicians of his generation, represented a Birmingham consituency populated by immigrants. He said that "a little black boy in Harlem thinks he can be president of the United States. A little black boy in my constituency knows he will never be Lord Chancellor."
The Harlem boy was only a little ahead of his time, but the chances of his black or Muslim counterpart in 21st-century Britain, or Ireland, will depend on whether society takes integration seriously.
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