Some aspects of the Irish abortion referendum were particularly interesting. One was the fares of Irish students in the UK being paid by some university groups to go back home and vote. Not so much of the ‘Saxon foe ‘ stuff nowadays! And who was paying and why? Actually why in particular, when you think about it.
An Irish daily newspaper- in an article quite opposed to abortion- makes the following point : ‘The vast majority-97% -of all abortions are in cases of crisis pregnancy, a deeply distressing circumstance in the main endured by women who are young , unwed or single’(we don’t see the distinction either). Where have these women been? It has been pointed out before that anybody sitting at the back of a bus full of schoolchildren and requiring an education in the mechanics of sex can easily receive a spectacularly wide one. In Victorian times or Edwardian times this could be obtained in brown paper covers from seedy shops near railway stations, but damn it, do young women not watch TV, where the narrative thread of any drama ever since the Bond films must have an interruption in the narrative thread for a coitus? Do they not watch perfume adverts? Or in 2018, even chewing gum adverts? Where have they been ?
The journalist Mary Kenny wrote the perceptive ‘Goodbye, Catholic Ireland’ which defined Holy Ireland rather effectively, juxtaposing Ireland’s astonishing missionary activity along with queries to Catholic magazines as to whether saying the rosary wearing gloves was still effective. This website’s favourite episode has been repeated too often . (You know the one- the toilet one ). A little Irish town I used to visit had a parish priest and two curates. Each had his own house, and the parish priest was known to some as ‘Old Belly o’Pups’, not a remark to be heard among the parishioners of the Cure D’Ars, one imagines. The wild boys of the parish playing cards at the back of the chapel during Mass have appeared in Irish fiction for nearly a hundred years. Further back, before the Famine, priests struggled unavailingly against faction fights and the fairy culture with its consequent high rate of infanticides, much worse than abortion , after all, since it involved picking up and murdering real live babies. The song ’Shall My Soul pass through Old Ireland, Lord ? ‘is in theological terms indicative of a stupefyingly low IQ. There is the pathological and all consuming Irish fear of what other people- from village idiots to the gombeen man, or anybody- might think of them, and its impact on high Mass attendance. There is obviously a great deal of stony ground beneath the green fields, and always has been.
But we must be fair, even to the Yes advocates. The Irish film star of the Thirties, Brian Aherne, a brilliant anecdotalist, was once interrupted in full flow at a meeting with friends in a Hollywood pub in the autumn of his career by someone activating the juke box. He remarked, passionately,’ Here I am, a poor old man, at the mercy of ever halfwit with ten cents to put into an illuminated coal scuttle’. A large percentage of those under fifty, thanks to social media , is also apparently at the mercy of every halfwit able to loft an opinion, however immature or weird into the Cloud. And worse still, to act on it.
To recap, the referendum was to remove the right to life of the unborn from the Irish constitution. The deflective construction of the Stealth bomber is highly effective, but beside that of the Irish episcopacy it is comparable to wet newspaper . Bishop Brendan Leahy of Limerick was first out of the traps, with a reference to the forthcoming visit of Pope Francis. An Irish bishop looking forward to a visit from Pope Francis ! Oh for a look at the agenda of a meeting between Pope Francis and the Irish episcopacy.
One of those Irish expressions , and there are several, which appear to have been constructed entirely and not at all surprisingly without reference to the concept of Christian charity, pungently remarks ‘ Hell slap it into them!’ It is not without distaste but with a nod to the fitness of things that we suggest this as a welcome to the meeting of the Irish episcopacy and Pope Francis.