General

The Westminster oath declares: “I … swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to Law. So help me God”. British oaths have a troublesome history in Ireland they‘re never insuperable but they always generate a row and a test for the conscience, for a while. In late February Leo Varadkar, Taoiseach, called on Sinn Féin to take the oath and with it their six – soon to be seven – Westminster seats “to make things better for Ireland”. Naturally, like all other voguish red-liners Sinn Féin have ruled it out. A spokesman said: “This is not even a topic of discussion within the party. We are an abstentionist party, and we are mandated to abstain from Westminster by the people who vote for us”. Writing in the Guardian Polly Toynbee noted: “For now, everyone says no. The winners might be those who make the biggest U-turn sacrifice for the sake of their country. If only they could mutter the loyal oath (they could always rescind it later) they would arrive in parliament as a cavalry of saviours of Ireland – and incidentally Britain”. Admittedly the true Brit-hater would prefer to let them stew a little, or lot, longer in their brew of contradictory shibboleths. But what is the pedigree of abstentionism? In 1921 De Valera refused to recognise the Anglo-Irish Treaty, ending the War of Independence, as it involved an oath of allegiance prescribed by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Five years later, after the resultant civil war, he abjured his objections subscribing to an identical formula but claiming that “he had taken no oath of allegiance to the British monarch” on entering Dáil Éireann. The oath in 1921 and 1926 was: “I will be faithful to HM King George V. . . in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain and her adherence to and membership of. . . the British Commonwealth of Nations”. In power from 1932, de Valera amended the Free State’s constitution to allow him to introduce any constitutional amendments irrespective of whether they clashed with the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and then to remove Article 17 of the constitution which required the taking of the Oath. Certainly the oath for De Valera was of fidelity not allegiance. Less of a lump to swallow than now. The idea of Irish nationalists abstaining from Westminster was in fact first suggested in the 1840s by Thomas Davis and Daniel O’Connell, though ultimately they felt that MPs sitting could not withdraw from Westminster without breaking the oath of office they had taken upon election. It was endlessly debated by Home Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell in the 1870s. Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa (in 1869) and John Mitchel (twice in 1875) were returned as independent nationalists at by-elections in Tipperary though O’Donovan Rossa was in prison at his election and Mitchel in exile. The results were invalidated. Michael Davitt set the tone and strategy – he was so fed up with the British system that he withdrew from Parliament in 1899 explaining: “I have for years tried to appeal to the sense of justice in this house of Commons on behalf of Ireland. I leave, convinced that no just cause, no cause of right, will ever find support from this house of Commons unless it is backed up by force”. Arthur Griffith, the original founder of ‘Sinn Féin’ in 1905, advocated withdrawal from the British Parliament as a tactic following the strategies of Hungarian and Czech nationalists in the Austrian Imperial Council in the 1860s. He considered that the Irish Home Rule Party shouldn’t go to Westminster but a council of 300 should meet in Dublin and usurp, by peaceful means, so much of the powers of government as it could. This seemed a good plan. 12 Tory MPs voted against the government to demand a meaningful Commons vote on the final Brexit deal. So things would be tight on Corbyn’s customs-union amendment. [Sinn Féin’s] four or five votes would swing it. Joseph McGuinness was the first ‘Sinn Féin’ abstentionist MP following a by- election in Longford South in May 1917. Even if he had wanted to take his seat, he would not have been able to do so as he was a prisoner in Lewes for his role in the previous year’s Easter Rising. In 1919, the 69 Sinn Féin MPs elected to Westminster in 1918 refused to take their seats there and instead constituted themselves in Dublin as the the first Dáil – the legitimate parliament of the short- lived Irish Republic. At its 1970 Ard Fheis Sinn Féin divided on whether or not to reverse its long-standing policy of refusing to take seats in Dáil Éireann. The split created two parties: ‘Sinn Féin’ and an anti-abstentionist rival to be known as ‘Official Sinn Féin which ultimately split between ‘the Workers’ Party’ and a group that fused with the Labour Party. The abstentionist party was initially referred to as ‘Provisional’ Sinn Féin, but after 1982 it was known simply as ‘Sinn Féin’; it continued to abstain from taking seats won in all institutions. In 1986 ‘Provisional’ Sinn Féin split, as in 1970, over whether to take seats in Dáil Éireann. The larger group led by Gerry Adams abandoned abstentionism, while Republican Sinn Féin (RSF), led by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh retained it. Sinn Féin’s first sitting TD was Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin in Cavan–Monaghan in 1997. It abandoned its abstention from Dáil Éireann and from Stormont in 1998. In the late 1980s Sinn Féin’s abstentionist MPs discovered that under rules to accommodate conscientious objectors and republicans they could avail of facilities at Westminster to represent their constituents, though they do not qualify for a salary. After the 1997 Westminster election the Speaker of Parliament, Betty Boothroyd, banned Sinn Féin from the facilities unless members took the Oath of Allegiance. That was overturned ve years later, although periodically Conservative and Unionist MPs and their allies in the press vituperate about the issue. Sinn Féin

They think the right to life begins at conception and ends at birth. I grew up in a feminist household where that telling put-down of our American anti-abortion brigade was part of the lexicon. (It was also a Catholic household, but when it came to reproductive rights, as most things, feminism trumped religion). It’s a crude line, but it describes a political right for whom opposing abortion is a priority, top of a list that also includes opposing social welfare and environmental regulation, supporting imperialist wars and the death penalty. Ireland’s own anti-choice crusaders don’t necessarily match the full spectrum of the stereotype – though they appear happy to take money from those who do. It’s nonetheless hard to stomach their late-breaking concern for ‘cherishing’ people with Down syndrome (DS) and other disabilities, a population they allege to be at risk of eradication in a more free regime for terminations. Fact-checking should easily dispose of their arguments. There are the countries like Finland where very liberal abortion laws accompany the highest levels of both rights and visibility for people with DS –- do you remember the punk band, all its members with intellectual disabilities, that represented Finland in the Eurovision? We can’t all be Finns, so how about the UK stats that show prenatally diagnosed DS cases as a proportion of terminated pregnancies actually decreasing? (Yes, there are countries with different attitudes: the point is that abortion laws don’t determine whether a given state, or a given family, chooses to accept or reject the birth of people with serious disabilities). Recent international history demonstrates conclusively, however, that it’s a mistake to enter any campaign with confidence that truth will prevail on its own strength, to put it mildly. (“Don’t bring the truth to a knife fight”, as one recent analysis put it more bluntly.) We need to talk about how we talk about DS and abortion. And since we can’t count upon the media to hold and host these conversations in a responsible and representative way, we need to sharpen our critical faculties about what we read and hear. We need to do better than the media when we seek to persuade people who profess to care about such issues of the urgent need to repeal the Eighth. One thing’s for sure: the media wouldn’t print or broadcast the language that came out of one group of mothers of children with intellectual disabilities who found themselves talking recently about the emerging role of DS in the anti-choice campaign. According to a participant who recounted the conversation to me, it sounded less like the school-gate and more like the back-room in ‘The Sopranos’, complete with murderous intent. “Fuck them, the fuckers. What the fuck do they know about it? Every smug fucker that votes to retain the Eighth to ‘save the DS babies’ should have to pay for the upbringing and education of a person with a disability”. It was good to see Down Syndrome Ireland (DSI) point out in January that people with DS can read and understand the current debate: recent research suggests that four out of five people with DS are capable of a significant level of literacy. But the charity’s implication that they and their families are sensitive souls who should be protected from such discussion smacks of the paternalism that you’d expect from, well, a charity. “Yes, I feel like I want to keep him away from the TV and radio for the next few months”, a mother whose son has DS told me. “But if the media actually were listening to people with DS instead of talking about them, it might be different”. Instead, they and their families hear the complexity of their lives and choices reduced to pointscoring soundbites, and the whole vast range of age and capacity encompassed by the condition reduced to cutelooking children on leaflets and posters. ‘Nothing about us without us’ – it’s a principle of inclusion and participation that media routinely ignore in relation to immigrants, Travellers, homeless people…It’s hardly surprising, given the challenges, that people with intellectual disabilities are, even in the hands of sympathetic journalists, always a voiceless ‘they’, never part of a vocal ‘us’. (For the record, my ten-year-old friend who has Down syndrome says terminating babies is wrong but governments shouldn’t interfere with people’s decisions. He also says he hates the term ‘special needs’ and wonders what credentials I’ve got to write this article.) Instead of listening to people with intellectual disabilities, the media turn to charities, generally DSI – a powerful organisation that does a lot of good, including resourcing the speech and language therapies that are vital if many people with DS are ever going to find their voices. But even the best charity is just that: charity. The disproportionate power of a charity like DSI is part of the problem in Ireland, where the State deliberately outsources so much basic welfare provision that addressing the needs of people with disabilities becomes a matter of ‘kindness’ and ‘cherishing’, rather than of hard-won human rights that the State must vindicate. The media complete this vicious circle of ‘care’ when they confer authority on charities, who often brilliantly take up the State’s slack, but whose existence depends on the maintenance of this outsourcing model. As the recent story of ‘Molly’ and her foster family demonstrated, life for people with disabilities and their families can be hard, costly, devastating for personal and working lives. Being forced to negotiate the largely unaccountable bureaucracies of charities, along the bewildering border with the barely accountable services of the State, to get physical aids, educational materials, assistive technology, appropriate food – you name it – makes it even harder. In that context, even well-meaning commentators can sound patronising. Fintan O’Toole’s mostly admirable column on DS and the coming referendum campaign pointed out, superfluously, that “most people with DS can live happy and fulfilled lives”. True, perhaps, but so what? What does that implied ‘happy and fulfilled’ threshold even mean?

Revelations of sex abuse in all-male private schools in past decades have been powerfully conveyed across the Irish media. That barbarism should not, however, deflect attention from other enduring problems. I believe grave damage is still being done to the development of boys in ostensibly civilised institutions. Moreover, unequal educational provision maintains widening inequalities, underpinning a pervasive competitive individualism. I draw on painful memories of my own educational background in Gonzaga College SJ (Society of Jesus ie Jesuit) to provide a critique of private, all-male education. This is a personal account and others will have different perspectives. In his ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, James Joyce’s boyhood character disparages children from non-private schools as “Mickey Muck and Paddy Stink”. We have an enduring educational snobbery. Many a privately-schooled chap still dons the proverbial old school tie. By the 1920s, one of the leading Dublin Catholic secondary schools for boys of its time, O’Connell School on Richmond Street, recommended its pupils in the following terms: “Your ‘Richmond Street’ boy makes a good official. In the first place he possesses the necessary academic qualifications to place him high on the examination lists. He has, in addition, certain qualities which make him a good colleague. This is an essential point. However clever an official he may be, he has to pull with the team …”. The abiding ambition of most all-male private schools remains not only to produce good examination results, but also to develop a cast of mind disposed to “pull with the team”, rather than swim against the tide. Jesuit institutions have led the way in this regard. Since independence a disproportionate number of high office holders in this state have been educated in Jesuit schools, especially Clongowes Wood SJ in Kildare, Belvedere College SJ in Dublin, and after its foundation in 1950, my own alma mater Gonzaga College SJ, also in Dublin. All three of these are all-male and private, while the first is also a boarding school. The appointment of John Marcus O’Sullivan as Minister for Education in 1926 marked a tipping point such that non-combative Clongownians in the Cabinet outnumbered veterans of the 1916 Rising. Simon Coveney and Richard Bruton continue what is a long line of Clongownians, though the former was expelled, seemingly for underage drinking. This elite education is now more likely to produce managerial material for a thrusting private sector than diligent civil servants. But in these academic hothouses, creativity is still conflated with rebelliousness. After school, positions of influence, and wealth generation, are preserved by ‘old boy’ networks. Pressure is felt in middleclass families to reproduce this status in their sons and, to a lesser extent, daughters. A dominant Catholicism permitted horrific abuse against an older generation in Ireland. Nonetheless, professional lawyers applying Thomistic principles built a State founded on principles of universal justice. For good, and ill, Bunreacht na hEireann, our Constitution, is promulgated “in the name of the Holy Trinity”. The 1960s witnessed the advent of an era of unprecedented judicial activism. By then many of our judges were drawn from all-male, Catholic, especially Jesuit, schools. They ‘discovered’ “Unenumerated Rights”, based on a ‘Catholic’ Natural Law interpretation of the Constitution, an expansive approach the Court has since grown wary of. Moreover, Fine Gael’s ‘Towards a Just Society’ document, conceived by Declan Costello in the 1960s, aligned closely with Catholic social teaching after Vatican II, contemplating a society built on socialist principles, including state ownership of banks. There are still Jesuits, such as the visionary Father Peter McVerry, who maintain a missionary vocation for social justice. But arguments for a fair distribution of wealth did not figure prominently during my own ‘Jesuit’ education, where charitable activities tended to be characterised by noblesse oblige, and an assumption that it was valuable to witness how ‘the other half’ lived. Class divisions were, if anything, upheld by an awareness of a pronounced economic fault line. The 1990s was a peculiar era to be a teenager as Irish society embraced the conformities and staid hypocrisies, of 1950s America, which the beat poet Allen Ginsberg decried in his ‘Howl’ (1954). He asked: “What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?”. In both, a hypocritical conformity was maintained. We abided: “with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls”. Binge drinking, and later bad hashish, were some of our preferred responses to a creeping sense of purposelessness. We stared agog at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and encountered foggy notions of an End of History. A pervasive popular culture, beholden to Mammon, including the exotic promise of sex in the sun played out on Australian soap operas, leached away instincts towards radical politics. The Leaving Certificate-obsessed and rugbybesotted Gonzaga I encountered demanded a dull conformity that did not give room for progressive post-Catholic ideas to flourish. Free-ranging speculation of a sort associated with the intellectual, or poet, was widely scorned. We passed from strangling religiosity to Neoliberal vacancy without coming up for breath. This has hobbled some of our best minds. Well before revelations of serious sexual misconduct, a Catholic ancien regime was already creaking, their pronouncements at odds with an upwardly-mobile generation of businessmen, who really ruled the roost. The emerging financial and technological sectors also boosted the professional classes, many of whose earnings spiralled. Gonzaga College SJ is still among the leading all-male secondary schools in the country, claiming a thoroughbred stable of academics, lawyers, and politicians such as Anthony Clare, Michael McDowell, and Peter Sutherland, the socalled “father of globalisation”. A sense of meritocracy was based on an entrance exam and Leaving Certificate results that often bred a preening elitism, without consideration of the worth of either. In my time, shades of Eton and Oxford cohabited with bog-Irish institutionalism, dissolving individuality into a corporate body toughened on rugby, and kept in check by cruel humour. Endowed with superficial polish, for many, meritocracy provided a fast train to plutocracy.