When the Vatican was told to get lost

HOME Rule no longer stands for Rome Rule in the Republic of Ireland. That, of course, has been the case for the past decade or so but for the first time, we have had a Taoiseach brave enough to tell the Vatican to get lost.

I have not been an admirer of Enda Kenny as a Taoiseach or a potential Taoiseach in the past. I have always liked him as a person. In his speech to the Dáil last week, he showed leadership qualities that were sadly lacking in his predecessors. 
The fact that this speech was delivered by a Fine Gael leader who is a practising Catholic made it all the more significant.
In the early years of this State, Fine Gael could be looked on as the political wing of the Catholic Church. Or to put it another way, the Catholic Church was Fine Gael at pray. The leaders of Fianna Fáil, most of whom had been excommunicated a few years previously, were looked on as anti-Catholic or, at least, anti-clerical. So Fianna Fáil had to show that not alone did the Catholic Church have nothing to fear from them but that they were even more Catholic than Fine Gael.
The Eucharistic Congress in 1932 presented Fianna Fáil with an excellent opportunity within a short time after the party was put into power for the first time, to prove its devotion to Rome. That devotion was copper-fastened a few years later when Eamonn de Valera enshrined the “special position” of the Catholic Church in the new Constitution of the State after consulting with the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid. 
The new State went on to show Edward Carson was right when he said that Home Rule would mean Rome Rule. While the northern six-county state went on to be a Protestant state for a Protestant people, the southern state became a Catholic state for a Catholic people. Our laws in many respects reflected that fact and if they didn’t always in theory, they certainly did in practice. When a group of Jehovah Witnesses were assaulted by a gang of Catholic “defenders of the faith” in Killaloe in the mid-’50s, they were treated as if they were the guilty ones in the dock.
We boasted we were not like the Protestants in the North. We could elect a Protestant as President of Ireland or a Jew as Lord Mayor of Dublin or Cork. But they were only token people without any power. We never elected a Protestant Taoiseach.
The fact is, we never felt threatened by the Protestant religion. They were only a tiny minority of about 5%. But I often wonder if they had a large minority of about 30 or 40%, would we be willing to elect any of them even to token offices? We handed over control of educating our children to the Catholic Church which also decided health policy in our hospitals.
Where the Catholic Church did not rule us through the machinery of the State, it controlled our lives from the time we got up in the morning until we went to bed at night. No, that’s only half true. It also controlled how we behaved in bed. It decided when we could have sex and how we could have it with our spouses. When we were younger, it ordered us to keep our hands outside the bed clothes.
The Catholic Church would not allow us to eat meat on Friday and in the diocese of Killaloe, it would not allow us to dance on a Saturday night, although it was ok to cross the Shannon and dance the night away in Limerick. Although it tried to put an end to that practice too by having the devil make an appearance at the Stella Ballroom one Saturday night in Limerick.
Not that we were complaining.  We couldn’t give the priests and the bishops enough power over us. We put them in charge of our county boards and of our hurling and football clubs right across the country. In short, we were a priest-ridden society but that is what we wanted.
Now that is all changing and Taoiseach Enda Kenny has signalled an official end to the old ways through his speech in the Dáil last week.
I don’t care whether the speech was written by himself or by others for him. It was his speech and he is standing over it. I don’t care either if he got some details wrong in his condemnation of the Vatican. The basic fact is that he told the Holy See they could no longer interfere with the laws in this Republic. Torture is torture and rape is rape whether those dreadful crimes are committed by people with collars around their necks or by people with no collars. They were committed against the most vulnerable in the land, innocent little children. There can be no hiding place for them. That, basically, was the message that Enda Kenny spelled out.
It was a great week for Enda Kenny, for Fine Gael and for the Government in general. They are riding high in the polls taken before the interest rate on our debt to Europe and to the IMF was cut by 2%, giving us a saving of perhaps a billion euros a year.
There may be more stormy times ahead as more cuts are imposed and more levies are introduced.  But the Government has such strong support, both in the Dáil and in the country, that it can afford to take the tough decisions now. So far, Enda Kenny has had a lot of luck, unlike Brian Cowen who was dogged by bad luck from the time he took office. Let’s hope he does not end up like Bertie Ahern whose luck ran out before he did.
Although neither Rome nor London now rule over us, beware of the power currently wielded by Berlin and Paris.