But, hark! a voice like thunder spake,
The West's awake! the West's awake!
True,
Enda Kenny did not speak with Thomas Davis's voice like thunder.
But
his words fell like a thunderbolt, followed by a forked lightning of
illumination that lit up the Irish historical landscape, past and
present, and showed us a far better future.
Like Bach's great
Lutheran hymn Wachet Auf! (Sleepers Awake!), Kenny's speech called on
the Roman Catholic officer class to wake from their sleep of the spirit.
But it went on to warn them that if they cannot reform their religion,
they must still live by the laws of the Irish Republic.
Accordingly,
its implications went far beyond the issue of child abuse which it
formally addressed
Kenny's revolutionary speech was not simply a
rebuke to the Vatican. It called for reform of the Roman Catholic
Church, confirmed that Home Rule did not mean Rome rule, and returned
the word "republic" to the Northern Protestants to whom it originally
belonged.
Like all great speeches it had good authority, slew a sacred
cow, and spoke the truths that set us free.
By good authority I
mean that only someone like Kenny, himself a practising Roman Catholic,
could have taken on his own side and survived. By speaking from inside
the fold he gave the rest of the Irish Roman Catholic flock the courage
to show the door to the bad shepherds. But he was not the only
Catholic layman to give a lead last week.
Another was the
philosopher Mark Dooley, whose newly published Why Be a Catholic?
courageously confronts what must be done if Catholicism is to survive as
a religion of redemption. And while I think of myself as an atheist --
something that distresses my devout Protestant friend David Norris -- I
found Dooley's book free of special pleading.
Unlike some
Catholic apologists, Dooley does not perfunctorily acknowledge the
suffering of children before rushing on to defend the church: he dwells
on the horror of what has happened.
But when he finally turns to
reform of the Roman Catholic Church, he makes sense. A priest, he
tells us, is not merely a social worker with a collar. He has to be
first and foremost a holy man.
Growing up as a Roman Catholic, I
met many holy priests. But their good deeds were shadowed by the Roman
Catholic Church's abuse of power since the start of the last century.
And to Kenny's speech, I could almost hear my own generation going back
over a long list of the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church, most of
them caused by an obsession with sex.
The Ne Temere decree of 1908
which attacked "mixed marriages"; the crawthumping Eucharistic Congress
of 1932; the blocking of Noel Browne's Mother and Child Scheme in 1950;
the boycott at Fethard-on-Sea in 1957; the arrogance of Archbishop
John Charles McQuaid; the campaigns against contraception and divorce;
and finally the revelations about child sex abuse.
Kenny's speech
also slew a sacred cow, more precisely a Papal bull, more precisely
still a Papal bully, namely the Vatican's praetorian guard and its
pretension to a global remit. By rejecting that remit in the Irish
Republic, Kenny rescued the word "republican" from any taint of Rome,
and freed it up for future use by Northern Protestants.
The
speech should also encourage southern Protestants to follow Bishop Paul
Colton's lead in putting their heads firmly above the parapet of public
life. This must go beyond engaging in empty ecumenical gestures.
Southern Protestants should seek an accounting for the sectarian actions
of southern Catholic nationalism between 1908-1922.
The Ne Temere decree of 1908 saw the Roman Catholic Church get into the marriage bed between Catholics and Protestants.
That
evil decree, which deprived Protestants of marriage partners, was
followed by enough sectarian actions by the Old IRA to cause the exodus
of thousands of Irish Protestants after the War of Independence, and
contributed its own tribal quota to the general loss of almost one-third
of our Protestant population.
The Balkan war showed us how little
it takes to frighten people from a village in which they have lived for
centuries.
Whether Irish Protestants left because of a bullet in the
post, a billeting on their family, or an insult in a pub makes no
difference.
They were told in many ways they were not wanted and they
left.
Bishop Colton's diocese of Cork suffered severely.
Last week
Sandra Murphy, in the Daily Mail, recalled that the IRA terror that
claimed 73 Cork Protestants' lives in the 1921/22 period also touched
the Musgrave family, which is today involved in the Superquinn takeover.
"John
L Musgrave and his cousin, Stuart Musgrave Jnr, also a director,
considered fleeing Cork if their lives became endangered."
Faced
with the Old IRA's sectarian actions in the Bandon Valley, at
Coolacrease and at Clifden Orphanage (to name only a few), some academic
historians have reacted exactly as Catholic apologists did to the
charge of clerical sex abuse.
To borrow the words of Kenny's scathing
summary, instead of hearing the sufferings of southern Protestants
with St Benedict's "ear of the heart' they preferred 'to parse and
analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer".
Real
republicans should be in the front ranks in publicising the sufferings
of Irish Protestants in the period 1919-22.
Because what happened
frightened them into a forced amnesia about the actions of the IRA, and
to politically keep their heads down. And that timidity, in turn,
confirmed the fears of Northern Protestants that some subjects were
taboo in the Irish Republic.
Even as committed an apologist for
Irish republicanism as the Portadown Presbyterian George Gilmore found
he had a breaking point.
In a 1951 essay entitled 'The Republic and the
Protestants' published in Sean O Faolain's The Bell, Gilmore listed
public incidents which grated on his Protestant sensibilities:
"Presidential
pledges of loyalty of 'the Irish people' to the Pope, lord mayoral
pledges of the loyalty of the 'people of Dublin' to the Pope, of 'the
people of County Dublin' to the Pope. Even the Congress of Trade
Unions has pledged the loyalty of 'its' members to the Pope. When is a
Portadown man an Irishman?"
Gilmore called on southern Protestants
to object to their loyalty being pledged to a foreign power and
concluded with these prophetic words: "If the influential leaders of
Irish Protestantism did make such a protest, I have no doubt that a
formula would readily be found whereby Irish Roman Catholics could
emphasise their own religious loyalties consistently with recognition of
the fact that something like one quarter of the Irish people have no
such loyalty."
An old cliche claims all political careers end in
failure. Political failure maybe, but not historical failure.
Churchill,
Gorbachev and Mandela are proof of that.
So even if Enda Kenny's
government finally ends in economic tears, last week's courageous and
cathartic speech will ensure him an enduring and honoured place in the
history of Ireland.