Until very recently the Republic of Ireland has been perceived as a conservative, traditional Catholic country. This perception was accurate until the early 1990s when there was a significant decline in the power of the Church. This was due to a combination of self-inflicted wounds, mishandling of several scandals1 and a more general liberalization of Irish society, influenced by second-wave feminist activism, civil rights movements and campaigns for lesbian and gay rights. Until then the Church had exerted immense political and social dominance over issues of sexuality and the family. Yet, despite this loss of influence, the Church and its secular allies remain a major force of resistance to liberalization in Irish society. More specifically, the Church has remained intransient on matters of reproductive rights for women and LGBT equality, most especially same-sex marriage. An historic collaboration between the Church and the Irish state meant that the Catholic Church not only became the appointed moral guardian of Irish society; it exerted huge levels of social control due to their dominance of almost all of the key institutions of education and health.
Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1993 and then only at the insistence of the European Court of Human Rights. Yet a mere 22 years later, Ireland was the first country in the world to give constitutional protection to marriage equality following a popular vote where two thirds of the electorate votes were in favour of the change.2 However, while equal rights for LGBT people are now fully enshrined and protected in law (although this does not mean a total eradication of homophobia in society), Irish women’s rights still lag behind many European countries, particularly in the area of reproductive rights. In 1983, Article 40.3.3 (known as the Eighth Amendment) was inserted into the Irish Constitution, creating a constitutional ban on abortion by equating the life of a pregnant woman with that of a fetus. Thirty years later, despite two further referendums in 1992 and 2002 and numerous court cases, abortion is illegal in almost all circumstances. In recent years, the mistreatment of pregnant women as a result of the Eighth Amendment has underpinned the campaign to repeal that amendment. The reality of Ireland’s abortion laws has come, nationally and internationally, into stark focus following the death of Savita Halappanavar in October 2012.3 The case sparked national and international outrage against Ireland’s regressive anti-abortion laws.
This chapter seeks to explore the role of the Catholic Church in both of these contexts focusing on its continuing attempts to preserve the privileged position of Catholic social thinking in both the Irish Constitution and social policy legislation. Using two major case studies – the recent marriage equality referendum (2015) and Ireland’s Constitution prohibition on abortion – we chart how the Catholic Church sought to exert its influence to restrict progressive change for women and the LGBT community. We will explore the strategies employed by the Irish Catholic Church and consider the influence played by the European Right and American evangelical ideology in terms of the development of these strategies. One interesting aspect of the response of the Irish Catholic Church to campaigns for women’s and LGBT rights has been the fact that, for historical and cultural reasons, “gender ideology” has not played a large part in these debates.
In 1922–1923 the Irish Free State emerged from the detritus of a War of Independence with Britain and a short but vicious post-imperial civil war. Almost immediately the Catholic hierarchy, a number of lay groups and the government imposed a Catholic construction of sexuality and worked to regulate it (Hug 1998). Irish identity and Catholicism became enmeshed, with the state identifying itself as Catholic, governing a Catholic people and following Catholic social thinking and practices. From the beginning of its existence, the Irish Catholic State found the activities of women and homosexual men in the public realm problematic socially, culturally and politically. This Church/state theocracy allowed a discourse on sexuality which was confined within the “thematic of sin” and which was preoccupied with explanations of what was “natural” that is heterosexual and reproductive and what was “unnatural” and “deviant”, that is everything else (Inglis 1998, 12). The 1937 Irish Constitution which privileged heterosexual marriage and the family as the normal and natural unit of society, and women’s place within society as in the domestic, reflected a “synthesis between Catholic, nationalist and democratic values in a way that provided a stable basis for constitutional continuity” for coming decades (Girvin 2002, 82).4
The Catholic “moral monopoly” (Inglis 1998) created one model of marriage which played a powerful role in the regulation of female sexuality and the reproduction of heterosexuality. Roman Catholic Canon Law enacted strict regulation (through the surveillance by priests) in relation to sexuality while the institution of marriage was a vehicle for the deployment of the laws governing sexuality (Inglis 2007). To many, the fundamental basic characteristics of Irish national identity were morality, purity and respectability, which were primarily seen as a woman’s responsibility. The consequences of this ideology for Irish society as a whole were profound. As Kathryn Conrad argues, while it effects were most acutely felt “by those who do not fit the model and (were) excluded, silenced, or punished” even those who appear “empowered within the system, are held hostage by it, trapped within the family cell” (Conrad 2004, 3–4).
In the 1970s, campaigns for the legalization of contraception gained increasing public support. Second wave feminism produced a new insistence that the personal is political, that private life was structured and affected by a range of political, social and economic structures and policies, which could be changed (Connolly 2003). However, due to the dominance of the Catholic Church on social thinking, Ireland remained a deeply conservative country, and while this does not “suggest that Ireland was unchanging”, it was true that the “pace (of change) was slower than elsewhere in Europe and that the form it took was constrained by local considerations and attitudes” (Girvin and Murphy 2013, 98).
Until the successful and progressive campaign for Marriage Equality in 2015, the most successful single-issue movement in the history of the Irish state was the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) which succeeded in inserting a constitutional prohibition on abortion into the Irish Constitution. Abortion has long been one of Ireland’s most divisive issues, and a study of how the issue has played out over the past 30 years reveals much about the debates between liberalism and Catholic conservatism in Irish society. Ireland in 2016 continues to have one of the most draconian abortion regimes in the world and despite widespread popular support for change Catholic conservative forces retain considerable influence on this issue.
The campaign to support a constitutional prohibition on abortion emerged in the late 1970s when a number of very conservative Catholic groups, fearing that, with the growing support for liberalization of equality laws, abortion could become legal in Ireland at some point in the future. Irish conservatives were concerned that in the wake of Ireland’s accession to the European Economic Community (1973), Europe would force a liberal social regime onto the country that could oblige “Catholic Ireland” to adopt a liberal “abortion on demand” regime, in a manner similar to how Ireland was instructed to introduce equal pay legislation in 1976. These fears were compounded when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in the United States (Roe v. Wade in 1973).
Irish conservatives feared that the Irish Supreme Court would decide, like their counterparts in the United States that the right to marital privacy not only included a right to contraception (as the Irish Supreme Court ruled in the 1978 McGee case) but a right to abortion as well. This fear drove them to begin an intensified campaign to change the Constitution that would have ramifications for thousands of women in Ireland and that we are still living with today (Lord 2015). According to David Gwynn Morgan, “opponents of abortion considered it at least possible that the Court, having discerned a right to contraception in an open area of the Constitution, might find a right to abortion in the same source” (Conroy 2015, 43).
But with support growing for a liberal social agenda, the Catholic Right began to fear their influence was waning. The widespread popularity of the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in September 1979 provided a rare opportunity to galvanize public support. Over 1.25 million people, a quarter of the Irish population, turned out to see the Pope in the Dublin’s Phoenix Park. This was a visible demonstration revealing that, despite the growing liberalization of Irish society, the Catholic Church maintained a considerable influence in Ireland (O’Reilly 1992). The Catholic Right sought to build on the success of this visit and the wave of popular support it appeared to express for the Church to build a campaign which would enshrine Catholic teaching on abortion in the Constitution and thereby ensure a “backlash” against what they viewed was the increasing advance of a liberal agenda.5
The first call for an anti-abortion amendment appeared in a leaflet produced by a fundamentalist Catholic lay-group, the Irish Family League, headed up by John O’Reilly. It specifically targeted the 1978 McGee ruling, saying that the matter of contraception was far too important to be left to the Supreme Court or legislators. It argued that the Constitution should define “a citizen as a citizen from the moment of conception and a prohibition on artificial contraception be inserted under clause 41” (Lord 2015, 94–95). O’Reilly went on to establish the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) in January 1981, which consisted of many religious and faith-based organizations.6 The make-up of PLAC demonstrated the sectarian and ideological nature of the campaign as “for all of these groups, abortion was just one front in a wider religious war” (O’Toole 2014, 6).
In October 1983, following a bitterly divisive referendum campaign, a constitutional prohibition (Article 40.3.3) on abortion, known as the Eighth Amendment, was signed into law. It states: “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.” The article clearly subordinates the life of a pregnant woman (who is referred to as “mother”) to that of the fetus she is carrying, making abortion illegal in all circumstances, except when abortion is deemed medically necessary in order to save the life, as distinct to the health, of the woman. This distinction between a woman’s life and her health is artificial and has no basis in medical practice. The distinction is of theological origin, based on the Catholic doctrine of double effect.
Emboldened by their Referendum victory, anti-abortion campaigners canvassed for the prosecution of any organizations, such as University Students Unions and the Well Woman clinics, who were providing women with information on how to travel to Britain for an abortion. These prolonged and expensive court cases invariably ended up in the European Courts. But here too the Catholic Right exercised their power and succeeded in having Protocol 17 inserted into the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. It stated: “Nothing in the Treaties or in the Treaty establishing the European Atomic Energy Community, or in the Treaties or Acts modifying or supplementing those Treaties, shall affect the application in Ireland of Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution of Ireland.” Article 40.3.3 is the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.
However, support for the anti-abortion position has collapsed in recent years following two tragic and very public cases. The first was the 1992 X case involving a 14-year-old rape victim known as Ms X. When the parents of Ms X attempted to take her to Britain for an abortion, the Irish state issued a high court injunction preventing her from leaving the country. There was outrage throughout Irish society with thousands of people taking to the streets in protest demanding that she should be allowed to have an abortion. The case was eventually appealed to the Supreme Court, which concluded that Ms X was entitled to an abortion because she was suicidal. Later that year under pressure from the Catholic Right, and hoping that anger over the X case had evaporated, a referendum was held to reverse the X case judgment. It failed. People voted in favour of a maintaining the X case judgment and made access to abortion information legal.7 The X case had changed the abortion argument in Ireland in that a large majority voted to vindicate a woman’s right to life-saving abortion. But political fear of the Catholic Right remained among Irish politicians and no legislation was introduced so abortion remained illegal. In 2012, a further tragedy struck with the death of Savita Halappanavar in University College Galway Hospital. The outcry occasioned by her death forced the Irish to act and finally introduce X case legislation (The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013) to allow life-saving abortions.
Despite the existence of a broad cased campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment which enjoys wide support across Irish society, the Catholic Church continues to oppose abortion in all circumstances. However, it has been reluctant to allow itself to be central to the debate in recent years, preferring instead to support the intervention of surrogate Catholic groups like CURA and the Iona Institute and offer discrete support to organizations like the Pro-Life Campaign. CURA was established by the Irish Episcopal Conference in 1977 and provides counselling services for women dealing with a crisis or unplanned pregnancy. Their ethos is “to ensure that every woman who is unhappily pregnant has immediate and easy access to the help which she needs … [and is] a service agency of the Catholic Church, and works in accordance with the compassionate vision and teaching of the Church”.8 The best-known secular surrogate is the IONA Institute. IONA, a privately funded lobby group, has become the Irish media’s go-to public advocate for Church positions, especially on women’s reproductive and LGBT rights. According to its mission statement, it “promotes the place of marriage and religion in society. Out starting point in debates about the family is that children deserve the love of their own mother and father whenever possible. We believe in publicly-funded denominational schools”.9
Other organizations which seek to defend the constitutional position include the Pro-Life Campaign and the notorious Youth Defense. Although the Pro-Life Campaign considers itself a “non-denominational human rights organization”, its founding members were associated with the Catholic PLAC organization of the 1980s. The Life Institute states that “it is committed to building a Culture of Life in Ireland, and is a centre of excellence for the development of cutting-edge information campaigns which seeks to protect human life and the family”.10 All these organizations have campaigned, under various guises, since the 1970s to ensure a rigid enforcement of Ireland’s abortion ban and are currently organizing to ensure that the Eighth Amendment is retained in the Constitution.
“Gender ideology” has not featured in the arguments advanced by these organizations. This is largely due to the fact that in Ireland the abortion debate has largely excluded women, focusing instead on the figure of the fetus, as an autonomous human being whose rights must be protected. These groups support the Church’s position that the unborn is an innocent human being who has a “right to life” and increasing invoke the language, not of “gender ideology”, but of human rights and, following the Marriage Equality referendum, equality. In a 1994 publication, which remains the Irish Church’s detailed statement on abortion, the Catholic hierarchy argued that the “unborn’s right to life is one of the inalienable rights of an individual”. It references the Roe v. Wade decision as giving “constitutional rights to abortion”, something which needed to be prevented in Ireland.11
In November 2012, following the death of Savita Halappanavar, the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference released a statement, which acknowledged that, although “abortion is the direct and intentional destruction of an unborn baby and is gravely immoral in all circumstances”, medical treatment for pregnant women who did “not directly and intentionally seek to end the life of the unborn baby” was different. They went to state that “current law and medical guidelines in Ireland allow nurses and doctors in Irish hospitals to apply this vital distinction in practice while upholding the equal right to life of both a mother and her unborn baby” a fact directly contradicted by Savita Halappanavar’s tragic death.12 The Bishops were engaged in linguistic obfuscation, outlined in the statement that “by virtue of their common humanity a mother and her unborn baby are both sacred with an equal right to life”.13 Because of the influence of Catholic social thinking on health policy (specifically the Eighth Amendment), medical practitioners have difficulty treating a pregnant woman with procedures which may damage or kill a fetus when there is still a fetal heartbeat. The Eighth Amendment also has significant implications for the treatment of women during pregnancy where the pregnant woman’s health as opposed to her life is at risk.14 Despite publicity around the deaths of several women because of these policies, the defence of the right to life of the unborn remains a central plank of any anti-abortion arguments of the Church or its secular surrogates. Since its 1994 publication, however, the Church has yet to make an explicit ideological intervention into the current (post-2013) abortion debate although we can anticipate the content and tone of this intervention through an examination of the arguments around the Marriage Equality referendum.15
For most of the 20th century, Irish official attitudes on homosexuality were governed by laws passed in the 19th century. The 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act made “buggery” an offence punishable by penal servitude, while the 1885 Criminal Amendment Act expanded the range of illegal male homosexual activity from buggery to all sexual acts between men. While the 1937 Constitution does not explicitly mention homosexuality, the normalization of the martial, procreative, heteronormative sexuality as the only acceptable performance of sexuality meant that any other type of female sexuality (including reproductive outside marriage) and male homosexuality were considered deviant and a threat to society.
As one Irish bishop stated “the question about legislation on such practices as divorce, sale of contraceptives, abortion and homosexual behavior … are questions about whether, or to what extent, freedom of conscience in this area can be reconciled with what public order requires, especially in so far as the latter entails care for the rights of others and for public morality” (Hug 1998, 3–4). It was this “normative approach”, informed by Church influenced social policies, which produced the inequalities under which LGBT individuals were regulated and sanctioned (Concannon 2008).
The first ruling of the Irish High Court (1980) upheld Ireland’s traditional statutes on homosexuality “on the grounds of the Christian nature of our State and on the grounds that the deliberate practice of homosexuality is morally wrong … that it is potentially harmful to the institution of marriage, I (the court) can find no inconsistency with the Constitution in the laws which may such conduct criminal”.16
Individual cases of hardship or oppression could not be allowed undermine the preservation of public order and morality according to the Court (Hug 1998). Therefore, it was made explicit that the “Christian nature” of the state, as defined by the Catholic Church, as outlined in the Irish Constitution and upheld by Irish laws, allowed for the criminalization of homosexuality on the grounds that it was “morally” wrong. The case was then taken to the European Court of Human Rights where an eventual judgment stated that, in the absence of any mention of homosexuality in the Constitution, the Irish Court had relied too much on Catholic theology and elevated sectarian ideals to interpret civil rights. It was ruled that Ireland’s laws on homosexuality violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In response to this, although not until 1993, the Irish Government decriminalized homosexuality.
In 1990, in response to ongoing campaigns for decriminalization, the Archbishop of Dublin, declared that homosexuality was an objective disorder. However, as evidenced by the public outrage over this comment, this was a moment of mutual incomprehension between the Irish people and the Irish Catholic hierarchy, who was no longer speaking the same language on sexuality and sexual morals (Hug 1998). In tandem with the liberalization of Irish society, the scandals of the early 1990s had cost the Church much as the moral guardian of society. As society awakened to the fact that “alongside the religious discourse emphasizing celibacy, purity, innocence, virginity, humility and piety, there existed practices of child abuse, incest, pedophilia, rape, abortion and infanticide” (Inglis 1998, 6), Irish people began to reject the guidance of the Church in matters pertaining to sexuality. The Catholic state for the Catholic people was becoming more secular and less Catholic.
After a long campaign, in 2010, a Civil Partnership Act was enacted, with the first civil partnership ceremonies taking place soon after that. There remained unease, however, among the more conservative elements in Irish society at the “feminist and liberal” agendas which were pushing, now, for civil marriage of LGBT people and full reproductive rights for women. The Bishops Conference made its opposition to this law and, to any further proposals to introduced marriage equality, very public. A strong statement from the Irish Bishops Conference (2014) stated that any proposed constitutional changes which might include marriage equality, would be “grave injustice”, expressing its “hope … that the referendum would be defeated” (D’Arcy 2014, 4).
Occasional references to “gender ideology” can be found from those opposed to same-sex marriage in various publications, as well as in online Catholic sites. In 2009, the Rathkenny Parish Newsletter reported that “gender ideology is being foisted on us by legislation and school curriculum”, and if it was unacceptable in African churches then why do we accept it in Europe. It was further argued, “gender (theory) separates the biological sex of masculine or feminine identity in stating that it is not intrinsic to the person but is a social construct”.17 This push back was in relation to the adoption, in Irish Secondary schools, of a module entitled Exploring Masculinities (EM). Many of the arguments about changes in attitudes to sexuality in Irish society happened in relation to sex education in the still largely Catholic-dominated school system. For instance, it was stated that EM and other such programmes would encroach on the moral questions on which the Catholic Church has definite teaching (O’Donoghue 1999). In particular, a normalization of homosexuality, especially among young people, was the feared outcome of these programmes.
Those who opposed the introduction of EM tended to use the concept of the imposition of a “feminist ideology” as a platform from which to critique the module. Journalists David Quinn and Breda O’Brien, both leading figures in the IONA Institute, argued against elements of the EM module. O’Brien, a secondary school religious teacher, is a columnist with the Irish Times, while Quinn is a journalist and commentator. They are both frequent contributors to print media and on radio and TV, supporting the teachings of the Catholic Church on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. They felt that EM was based on the premise of gender as a social construct, that it was influenced by an explicitly feminist and Left liberal agenda, which was an attempt, according to David Quinn, to feminize boys, (with) its social engineering, and its phony ideology (Mac an Ghaill, Hanafin and Conway 2002). It was argued that overemphasis on homosexuality as valid lay with the underlying “feminist ideology” of the EM modules. In its opposition to EM the Catholic Schools Parents Associations (CSPA) denounced it as an attempt to introduce politically correct, secular ideologies which went against parents religious beliefs and were morally wrong, into schools (Mac an Ghaill et al. 2002).
Rather than using the term “gender ideology”, discussions often centred on the wrongs caused by feminism and feminist ideologies, especially when relating to the social construction of masculinity and femininity. An editorial on the CatholicIreland.net site reported on the World Synod of Bishops in 2015 in which “gender ideology” was outlined and said to have a negative influence by dissolving “the family, parenthood, and human love”.18 There was a concern that feminist and/or “gender ideology” was destroying the concepts of the natural family and the primacy of heterosexuality.
As the campaign for full marriage equality got underway, the invidious position of the Irish Catholic Church as a moral arbiter in society was exposed. Child sex abuse scandals had raised real doubts about the legitimacy of the Church as a moral leader, and as morality was the core of its legitimacy, these scandals undermined its ability to give real leadership in opposition to civil marriage. In many ways, the official Church had little influence and it was among its secular allies/surrogates that opposition to the same-sex referendum was undertaken. The groups were involved in the No campaign included the Iona Institute, Mothers and Fathers Matter, StandUp4Marriage, First Families First, a number of politicians including Senator Ronan Mullen & Senator Jim Walsh as well as a number of well-known public commentators and conservative thinkers.
The Catholic Bishops biggest impact, however, was in their ability to reach weekly congregations with a pastoral letter, The Meaning of Marriage, which was circulated to 1,360 parishes nationwide. Its argument was based on the idea “that marriage should be reserved for the unique and complementary relationship between a woman and a man from which the generation and upbringing of children is uniquely possible” (Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference 2015, 2).
The Bishops noted that the Constitution of Ireland regards the family “as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State” and that “any attempt to change this protection would be a radical change in the meaning of marriage – the ‘foundation stone’ of society – in the document that expresses the foundational values of the Irish State” (Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference 2015, 5). The preservation of the unique relationship between the Catholic state and the Catholic people was a principle argument from the Bishops for the preservation of traditional marriage. While “gender ideology” is not mentioned, the language of complementarity used in the pastoral is similar to and echoes themes used throughout Europe:
Male – female complementarity is intrinsic to marriage. It is naturally ordered toward sexual union in a faithful, committed relationship as the basis for the generation of new life … An essential characteristic of marriage is the biological fact that a man and a woman can join together as male and female in a union that is orientated to the generation of new life. (Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference 2015, 4)
The main argument against same-sex marriage, used by the church and most of the secular anti-equality organizations, groups and individuals, was based primarily on the defence of traditional and reproductive marriage and of the right of a child to a father and mother. As stated in an editorial in Irish Catholic newspaper:
The legal recognition of marriage as a union between male and female does not discriminate but appropriately differentiates. It is appropriate because only the union between man and woman is open to new life. To try to make marriage something else, by simply repeating that it is about, “marriage equality”, numbs the engagement of our consciences, which, in silence and peace, tell us the truth that we are made male and female, and made by a male and a female. This is the unchanging truth upon which marriage, as the bond between a male and a female, is based. (Conway, Van Nieuwenhove and Treacy 2015a, 3)
The No message continued to be focused on “traditional family values” throughout the campaign. As voting day approached, No campaigners honed in on questions of adoption and surrogacy which they felt, being related to the concepts of traditional family and children, were integral to the decision. The family, as composed in marriage of a man and women, was, they argued, the only true, acceptable, natural and moral place in which “to found a family”.
There were some arguments about the impact of “gender theory” where the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland, Eamon Martin, wrote that the referendum sought to introduce the “new orthodoxy” of “gender-neutral marriage”.19 Professor Eamonn Conway and Dr Rik Van Nieuwenhove, theologians at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick and Patrick Treacy SC of Integritas,20 argued that “Gender theory [was] … an important building block in the argument for same-sex marriage as if there are no real differences between men and women, or that people can simply choose their gender, then it follows that there is no basis for defining marriage as between a man and a woman only, or for seeing such relationships as distinctive”. However they also admitted that there had not been many public debates in Ireland about “gender theory and its significance unlike in other countries where the effect of gender theory is being felt … in schools and in places of work” (Conway et al. 2015a).
Like the Bishops, their argument was on understanding “marriage as the unity that is only possible between a man and a woman, different from each other, and so uniquely able to complement each other”. Accepting “gender theory” would redefine marriage as between two people “without distinction to their sex”, which, they argued, for people who found “gender theory” unconvincing and held on to the belief that “the distinction between the sexes is real and natural, valuable and essential, then we have to reject the proposed redefinition of marriage” (Conway, Van Nieuwenhove and Treacy 2015b).
However, over the course of the campaign, “gender theory” never really became part of the public discussions of opposition to marriage equality. Those who opposed same-sex marriage did so in defence of marriage as defined in the Constitution. Groups campaigning for a No vote argued that allowing same-sex marriage would redefine marriage and, in turn, redefine the family, as protected by the Constitution. This family model being, of course, the heteronormative family based on marriage under the rites of the Church. They concentrated on adoption and surrogacy, emphasizing the fact that the ideal form of family in which to raise children was one with two biological parents of the opposite sex. While the language used in defence of the traditional family, of the complementarity of male and female and of the rights of children to a mother and father was central to the campaign, it was not, generally, openly referred to as opposition to “gender ideology”. Despite these arguments, on 22 May 2015, the Irish people voted to accept Amendment 41 of the Constitution; therefore marriage can, according to Constitution “be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex”. It was, as the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, acknowledged in a media interview a “social revolution” in Ireland, adding that the result served as “a reality check” for the Catholic Church in Ireland (Healy 2015).
Much of the activism on LGBT rights and women’s rights in Ireland, especially in relation to reproductive rights and same-sex marriage, has focused on constitutional change. This stems from the historical nature of the Irish state, as law and social policy in the areas of reproductive rights and sexuality were dominated by Catholic social thinking. The Irish state, which came into being in 1922, accepted the mores of Catholic ideology in legislation and in the Constitution: It formalized and legitimized these ideologies with its constitutional ban on abortion and its defence of traditional marriage. This meant that, in essence, the wars between those who sought to liberalize these laws and those who sought to preserve them were fought through legislative change and through the Constitution. In Ireland, the next battle will be the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment from the Irish Constitution.21 As David Quinn of the Iona Institute, said in anticipation of the battles to come: “Those seeking abortion will be hugely emboldened by what happened on Friday (22 May 2015). At the same time, however, many politicians will know that the 38 percent of people who voted against same-sex marriage can be turned into a majority opposed to deleting the Eighth Amendment (which bans abortion)” (cited in Kelly 2015).
The defence of the Catholic identity of the Irish state, especially in its control of women’s reproductive bodies, is the final battleground. Ireland was constructed, from its foundation, as a Catholic state for a Catholic people, and so the dismantling of that has to happen through amending Constitution and changing legislation. In reality, this is about disentangling the ties that bind the Church and state together. These ties have been undermined and are slowly unravelling but many remain, especially though the control of women’s bodies, through resistance to further LGBT rights and through Church control of the education and healthcare systems.
While, “gender ideology” has not formed an overt part of that battle for legislative change, the language used reflects or mirrors the language of anti-gender campaigns in Europe, although usually couched in terms of resisting feminist or left-wing agendas. However, there are signs that “gender ideology” will form a more definite part of future debates, especially as transgender rights are now an issue in Ireland. In an article written in 2015, David Quinn condemned “gender ideologues (who) believe that gender is a social construct, pure and simple”. In “this brave new world” advocates of “gender ideology” “want us to believe that categories of male and female exist mostly in our heads, and are not an intrinsic, basic and fundamental element of what it means to be human” (Quinn 2015). Quinn wrote this to oppose any pro-trans policies, including a school program for junior students, Different Families, Different Love, which he wrote, would teach “junior infants (4/5 years olds) about transgenderism” (Quinn 2015).
Defending Catholic Ireland will continue to motive the Church and its lay allies. In particular the attempts to remove primary- and secondary-school education from its control will be strongly resisted. It is here that they can still combat, they argue, feminism and “gender ideology”. However, while it is certainly true that Catholic ideology continues to dominate and inform the teaching of sex education in schools and the treatment of pregnant women in hospital, this ideology is coming under severe scrutiny and public opinion grows increasingly hostile. This means that the campaigns for secular education and a human rights complaint abortion regime are operating in a more friendly environment that could realistically been imagined even a decade ago.
1.The litany of scandals which effected the standing of the Irish Catholic Church, from 1990, included revelations of several child abuse scandals in parishes and in schools run by religious orders. What was revealed in these many scandals was a system of abusive institutionalization (including Industrial Schools, Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes and Orphanages) in which poor children, “immoral” girls and women and homosexuals were incarcerated, many for life, between 1922 and the 1980s. Most of the institutions were run by religious orders of brothers or nuns, under the guidance of the bishops. Several inquiries into these abusive institutions (The Ryan Report, the Commission to Inquire into Church Abuse, 2009, on industrial schools, the McAleese Inquiry in Magdalen Laundries, 2011) led to millions paid out in compensation to men and women who experienced these institutions and a decline in the moral standing of the Church among Irish citizens.
2.On 22 May 2015 a referendum was held to amend the Irish Constitution (the Thirty-Fourth Amendment of the Constitution) to permit marriage to be contracted by two persons without distinction as to their sex. Prior to this enactment, the Constitution was assumed to contain an implicit prohibition on same-sex marriage. The amendment was approved by 62% of the electorate on a turnout of 61%.
3.Halappanavar, admitted to University Hospital Galway at 17 weeks pregnant, died due to complications of a septic miscarriage. She had repeatedly requested a termination but was denied one due to the presence of a fetal heartbeat. Doctors treating her felt unable to act due to the presence of the Eighth Amendment in the Constitution, which permits medical intervention only where there is a “real and substantial risk” to the life, as opposed to the health, of the pregnant woman. By the time doctors decided to intervene it was too late and Halappanavar died.
4.The Constitutional articles which reflected this Catholic society thinking are: Article 41.1: “In particular, the State recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” Article 41.2: “The State shall, therefore, endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labor to the neglect of their duties in the home.” Article 41.3: “The State pledges to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.”
5.Journalist David McWilliams in his book The Pope’s Children (2005) points to the fact that the Irish birth rate peaked in June 1980, exactly nine months after the pope’s visit, with 10% of male children born that year being named John Paul.
6.The PLAC consisted of the Congress of Catholic Secondary School Parents’ Associations, the Irish Catholic Doctors’ Guild, the Guild of Catholic Nurses, the Guild of Catholic Pharmacists, the Catholic Young Men’s Society, the St Thomas More Society, the Irish Pro-Life Movement, the National Association of the Ovulation Method, the Council of Social Concern (COSC), the Irish Responsible Society, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, the St Joseph’s Young Priests Society (i.e. young Catholic priests) and the Christian Brothers Schools Parents’ Federation. The initial meeting was chaired by the head of a 14th organization that was immensely influential on the campaign behind the scenes, the secretive, all-male Catholic brotherhood – the Order of the Knights of Columbus. Although what O’Reilly’s (1992) work reveals is that many of these impressive sounding guilds, associations and congresses were actually the same people using different titles.
7.Until 1995 it was illegal to even give someone the phone number of an abortion clinic in Britain or Europe.
8.CURA website: http://www.cura.ie/about/history. Accessed 3 November 2016.
9.IONA website: http://www.ionainstitute.ie/. Accessed 3 November 2016.
10.Life Institute website: http://www.thelifeinstitute.net/about-us/who-we-are/. Accessed 3 November 2016.
11.Catholic Church and Information Office (1994, 1–27).
12.Standing Committee of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference (2012).
13.Ibid.
14.See AIMS: The Associations for Improvements in Maternity Services Ireland, http://aimsireland.ie/. Accessed 3 November 2016.
15.It is more than 20 years since the last publication by the Irish Catholic Church of a text on abortion: The Catholic Press and Information Office (1994).
16.The Irish Reports (1984) Containing Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of Appeal, the High Court of Justice, the Court of Bankruptcy, in Ireland, and the Irish Land Commission (Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for Ireland), 64.
17.Rathkenny Parish. 2009. “Gender Theory’s Dangers Exposed.” Accessed 3 November 2016. http://www.rathkennyparish.ie/patron-saint/1452.
18.Catholic Ireland.net. 2015. “Working Document is Too Negative, Synod Fathers Say.” Accessed 3 November 2016. http://www.catholicireland.net/working-document-negative-synod-fathers/.
19.Catholic Ireland.net. 2015. “The Marriage Referendum: 22 May 2015.” Accessed 3 November 2016. http://www.catholicireland.net/marriage-referendum-reasons-voting/.
20.Integritas is the name of a domestic centre of Christians spirituality situated at Ennisnag, Stoneyford, County Kilkenny, Ireland, run by married couple, Linda Rainsberry and Patrick Treacy. As stated on their site “the center has emerged from the belief that a new appreciation of the beauty, truth and goodness of Christian spirituality is the greatest need of our time”. Accessed 3 November 2016. http://www.integritas.ie/final/.
21.These battles will be fought on many fronts. Recently (April 2016) a debate has opened up around the new National Maternity Hospital, which will be sited in the St Vincent’s Hospital campus. St Vincent’s is a Catholic foundation, owned by the Religious Sisters of Charity who still have representatives on the Board of the Hospital (Hogan 2016). Concerns have been expressed about the “Catholic ethos” of St Vincent’s, which as a Catholic-controlled hospital might “forbid the provision of modern contraceptive services, IVF, sterilization operations and gender reassignment surgery” and concerns were also expressed about the “implementation of the Protection of Life in Pregnancy Act” (Cullen 2016).
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Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference. 2012. “Statement by the Standing Committee of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference on the Equal and Inalienable Right to Life of a Mother and Her Unborn Child.” Accessed 3 November 2016. http://www.catholicbishops.ie/2012/11/19/statement-standing-committee-irish-catholic-bishops-conference-equal-inalienable-life-mother-unborn-child/.
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