Literary critic Harold Bloom said that all poets must confront their precursors in a type of “Oedipal struggle in order to create an imaginative space for themselves”. He felt that those who came late to the scene of cultural upheaval go through a process of “misreading” their predecessors.
It appears as if progressive Ireland has been engaged in an Oedipal struggle against its Catholic heritage. And 2023 has seen a further acceleration of the transformation of the political and social landscape in Ireland with the aim of repudiating in the fullest manner the remnants of Catholicity in Ireland in an Oedipal-like struggle for dominance.
Ireland, after a century of Catholic cultural dominance, has witnessed an upheaval that would have been unimaginable thirty years ago.
The removal of a general legislative ban on contraception in 1992 followed what was infamously described by then Taoiseach Charles Haughey as “an Irish solution to an Irish problem” whereby only married couples could acquire contraceptives on prescription at a pharmacy.
In 1995, the introduction of divorce through a popular vote by the narrowest of margins (50.3 per cent v. 49.7 per cent) compared to a 1986 vote where divorce was wholeheartedly rejected, was the second sign that Ireland was throwing off its Catholic baggage in the 1990s.
A rapid decline in the moral authority of the Church was catalysed by the sexual abuse crisis that came to the fore at the end of the second millennium. The transformation was accelerated by the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar in 2012, with the accusation that she died because Ireland was “a Catholic country”.
Savita’s death hastened the introduction of abortion into Ireland in 2013 for emergency cases before the Constitutional protection for the unborn was wiped out through a referendum in 2018. This followed the introduction of same-sex marriage through the same process – with an almost identical two to one majority in 2015.
Also in 2015, with less fanfare, and with an almost comical lack of awareness of the possible repercussions, Ireland introduced the Gender Recognition Act, allowing individuals to change their legal gender through a simple signed declaration with no restrictions or controls.
And 2023 took all this “progress” even further. Draconian “hate speech” and “hate crime” legislation introduced by the Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, passed through the lower house of parliament with the smallest of dissenting voices. It proposed that subjective and undefined interpretations of hate, offence, gender identity, are enshrined in a law that will put religious freedom and foundational religious beliefs going back millennia in direct opposition to the new right of people not to be offended.
The Minister of Health, Stephen Donnelly, appeared on national television to promote his proposal that Ireland legislate to allow for international surrogacy while prohibiting surrogacy arrangements in Ireland, and with support from government parties. The bizarre proposal appears to be another “Irish solution to an Irish problem” as other countries in Europe move in the opposite direction to restrict surrogacy as an inherently exploitative practice.
The same ministers have come together to push legislation for abortion “safe access zones” that will potentially see silent prayer near abortion-providing centres criminalised and churches prohibited from offering abortion alternatives on their own grounds. The government is also likely to propose the removal of three-day “cooling off” periods that has proven to save hundreds of babies from abortion.
The latest legislative proposal to be brought forward for 2024 is a ban on “conversion therapy” that conflates conversion of same-sex attracted individuals with gender non-conformism and considers gender identity to be immutable once non-conforming. Critics argue that this will lead Ireland down a path where gender-identity affirmation is the only allowable treatment of gender incongruence or gender dysphoria, pushing vulnerable teenagers down a path of puberty blockers, which leads to gender reassignment surgery and possible regrettable self-mutilation, while criminalising anyone that may dare suggest “stop” or at least pause to think things through.
The Minister for Education has continued on a crusade of forcing a State-led syllabus on relationship and sexuality education (RSE) on all schools and at all levels from Primary, through Junior Certificate and to Leaving Certificate, which promotes gender identity as fluid and mutable. Catholic teaching even in Catholic schools is considered subordinate to the State ideology.
As with the proposed hate speech legislation that received a significant negative response from the public, any attempts at engaging with the consultation process regarding the syllabi has been met with gaslighting from the government attempting to construe public opinion as marginal coordinated campaigns by “far-right” groups.
As 2023 turns to 2024, secondary-school teacher Enoch Burke remains incarcerated in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, ostensibly for refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of a demand from the principal of Wilson Hospital Secondary School, that he refer to a student by a preferred pronoun which is at odds with that child’s biological sex. In 2023, a government minister mistakenly claimed students were entitled by legislation to be referred to by a preferred pronoun and received almost no scrutiny for the misstep, either from opposition or media. A marginal politician was feted for refusing to “gender” his newborn child.
In 2024, on International Women’s Day, Ireland will hold two further referenda, one to remove the protection of the mother to be forced by economic necessity to choose working over caring duties, in the name of gender equality; and the second to extend the constitutional understanding of the family beyond that of marriage to include undefined “other durable relationships”, moving further from a Catholic understanding of the good that the State ought to promote and protect.
With Church attendance dropping off a cliff in Ireland, the government assumes that the “Catholic” vote is diminishing and that the “progressive” causes are the ones that will garner the positive headlines, with most leading Irish media operating a political newsroom approach, presenting news in a manner aligned with government policy and antipathetical to Catholic positions.
As Irish politics manifest what Alex de Tocqueville described as administrative despotism, the country is led by a government being wagged by the tail of a small number of ideologically driven ministers, with the majority of elected representatives silenced by adherence to the party whip. While the main opposition, Sinn Fein, is more committed to the government agenda than the government itself. Legislative proposals are objected to by just a handful of independent politicians and small parties such as Aontu.
However, there are some green shoots of non-conformity to the new ideology that provide some cause for optimism as we cross into 2024. An in-depth Parliamentary Committee’s consideration of euthanasia has uncovered much of the disingenuousness that lies at the heart of the “assisted dying” narrative, even if the discussions remain under-reported.
The Enoch Burke saga has forced politicians and media into an uncomfortable position of seemingly tolerating the situation in a liberal democracy whereby a young man is in prison for contempt of court after losing his job for not submitting to gender pronoun bandwagon. After over a year of evasion and hiding behind the procedures, one major news outlet finally admitted in December 2023 that it is gender identity that is at the crux of the issue of his incarceration.
The State broadcaster, RTE, on its flagship current affairs programme Prime Time, after years of ignoring the issue, finally gave a balanced and critical look at gender affirmative “care”. Although it presented the issue as if it was a new development it had uncovered, rather than something under the spotlight in the UK for the last three or four years, the report reflects a recent call from the Irish Prime Minister to have an “informed, balanced, debate” on transgenderism.
These small developments point Ireland, with a heavy dose of caution, toward the post-Oedipal phase of its development (continuing the Freudian analogy), with the formation of its super-ego “developing a sense of morality, and learning to override basic desires and instincts“.
It may be that post-Catholic Ireland has been in a state of rebellious adolescence, acting out for want of any coherent sense of identity beyond its anti-Catholicism, and now could be starting to find a way to co-exist with its heritage rather than live in a state of constant repudiation.
This may not lead to any significant resurrection of the Irish Catholic Church, but it may offer the space for it to find its own identity free from the shadow of its post-colonial inheritance. However, this may come too late for many children whose lives have been subsumed beneath licentious adult desire and the cult of individual choice.
Catholics and conservatives in Ireland would be well advised to remember Roger Scruton’s warning about the dangers of false hope (and the uses of pessimism), if it is to be ready for the last dying offensives of Oedipal Ireland.
Photo: Flames rise from a car and a bus after the worst rioting seen in the Irish capital for decades following the stabbings of three children earlier in the day, 23 November 2023. (Photo by PETER MURPHY/AFP via Getty Images.)
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