1918 - A Fitting Tribute

Tomorrow marks the 100th anniversary of the 1918 general election.

This election was Ireland's "Brexit" or "Irexit" as you might call it. Sinn Féin won 73 out of 105 seats and therefore a mandate to form the First Dáil and withdraw from Westminster. As a retrospective validation of the 1916 Rising and its principles, it was a seminal point in a chain of events that would culminate in the establishment of the sovereign Irish State.

How fitting then that 100 years later, the State born out of that very upheaval would effectively torpedo Global Britain - that grand plan of a fantasist fringe to revive the Empire. Of course a false equivalence should not be made between the two events. The Irish people's exit from the UK was a  necessarily unilateral act against an Empire that did permit anyone to leave, whereas the British withdrawal from the EU sees it freely leave a voluntary political association of member states (via Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty).

Nevertheless there is an undeniable symmetry and therefore irony. This is especially so when we consider recent comments from some in the British Tory party about the behaviour of the Irish government during Brexit negotiations. The BBC reports of a grandee in the party who believes that "the Irish really should know their place".

It seems it is only dawning on some that Ireland is indeed a sovereign state and as such has the right to pursue its own interests, which may very well diverge with those of the UK. That it would take this long for the penny to drop is not totally incredible. Afterall, having a right and having the power to enforce that right are two very different things.

One does not need to be a Europhile to recognise that membership of the EU has greatly empowered us here. This is not to say that EU membership doesn't encroach upon our sovereignty in other ways, that the EU does not act out of self-interest or that the EU is not capably of bullying us. 

But at this point in time, there can be no doubt that EU membership has worked in our favour. And we need to be a sovereign nation to draw upon that power and use it. Scotland, for example, lacks the seal of sovereignty and as such can only watch as an apathetic political elite ignores its interests. Without EU membership Ireland would not have this power. More fundamentally, though, without the seal of sovereignty, there would be nothing to empower.

So let us raise a glass to Ireland's great victory in 1918, which continues to pay dividends a century later.

Voting day

Blasphemy vote

In a previous post I had signalled an intention to spoil my vote in the blasphemy referendum. The logic behind this was that the referendum should not have been held and spoiling my vote was the best way of expressing my disapproval of this. I felt that to vote No would validate the referendum being held.

In the last few days I have had doubts about this. Basically I realised that a No vote actually has two meanings; firstly, it can mean you say no to the substantive proposition; secondly, it can also mean a simple desire to maintain the status quo, without engaging with the referendum itself.

Therefore, if you object to a referendum being held at all, a No vote is the most appropriate response. And this is distinct from the situation where you believe the referendum is valid, but still wish to vote no on the substantive point.

Presidential election
My first preference went to Peter Casey for the simple reason that he was the best of a poor selection.

"Binary identity"

Speaking in the context of Britishness, former leader of the Ulster Unionists, Mike Nesbitt, says he does not believe it is helpful to think in terms of 'binary identities', that is, thinking of people as being either British or Irish, or British or European. He cites poet John Hewitt's hierarchy of identity; Ulster, Irish, British, European. One can be all four.

He further adds that he does not believe that it is honest to think in this way on the basis that there are not many "pure gaels" or "pure Brits". He points to the fact that many Irish Catholics fought in the first world war, i.e. they were Gaelic yet British.

Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times columnist, agrees with him saying that around the year 2011/12 Irish and British people (probably meaning such people on the island of Ireland) were moving away from the "neurotic" approach of defining themselves on the basis of who they were not and in fact started to define themselves "by the actuality of their real existence which is quite complex and ambiguous rather than through these binaries." He then makes the point that Brexit has upset this and that the push for a hard Brexit is forcing people back into these binaries.

It is undoubtedly the case that one can have multiple identities, or at least that there can be multiple levels to one's identity. What is not the case, though, is that a person can have more than one political identity. A political identity is a very particular type of thing and one can ultimately only owe one's allegiance to one political order. Otherwise what would happen if two or more of the political orders one subscribes to came into conflict with each other? Implicit in the idea of order is the idea of  singularity. If you had multiple orders, this would lead to potential chaos which is clearly a contradiction. 

A person could certainly be politically British and only culturally Irish, or vice versa, and this would not cause a problem per se. Ian Paisley Sr. was an example of a man who considered himself Irish, though in a cultural/provincial sense that was subordinate to his political Britishness. Crucially, this did not mean Paisley was in any doubt as to Westminster's ultimate right to govern Ireland. That was the order of things. His Irishness only went so far.

Both Nesbitt and O'Toole seem to miss this important distinction between political identity and other types of identities. In speaking of people having complex and ambiguous identities, O'Toole appears to say that this means your political identity becomes equally complex and ambiguous, i.e. because the Irish are now so ambiguous and complex, so is their politics. I believe this to be rubbish. Our political identities are just as binary as they ever have been and ever will be; it's just that the politics we identity with have changed profoundly. We don't think in terms of a Holy Messianic struggle of National Liberation from Monarcho-Imperial oppression anymore. We now think in terms of being the model citizens of a global liberal democratic order. The binary is still there, it has simply moved.

What really copper-fastened the peace process in the North was not belligerents overcoming their differences but the divisions between them being rendered utterly trivial in an age of globalisation. Like a tidal wave, it washed away the importance and significance of their enmity. New enmities and divisions replaced the old, defined according to notions like the War on Terror. Irish and British cultural identities, along with many others, were subsumed into a new bigger narrative. But the binary distinctions that mark the political in any society at any point in history remain.

Thus, at the heart of Nesbitt and O'Toole's account is a delusion, if not a deceit, that the end of old school nationalism and unionism marks the end of binary identities.

Blasphemy

In a previous post, I suggested that the designation of the enemy in Ireland's politics had changed fundamentally. Rather than seeing our enemy as the British or British imperialism, our politics now increasingly sees Catholicism as the enemy.

As discussed in that post, the political is that part of discourse that is concerned with distinguishing friends from enemies in a somewhat black and white fashion. In a democratic republic, the process of enemy designation is a public process determined by as wide a range of the population as possible. In a more elitist system, the process is largely privatised and monopolised by the few.

In the Ireland of 1918, British imperialism was the enemy of a newly emerged and broad-based provincial middle class.  Some culturally influential was this class that it spilled over into Dublin in a rare example of reverse colonisation. This class was the effective ruling class in its day and so its politics reigned supreme. In the Ireland of 2018, Catholicism is the enemy of the current ruling class, which in contrast to the ruling class of a century earlier, is geographically concentrated around Dublin and oriented around international capital interests.

The politics of any given society is in a constant state of flux. The enemy is always being re-defined to suit the needs of that society's ruling class. No society has the moral high ground when it comes to this ugly business. However, I think it is fair to say that a politics which tracks a broader range of interests is superior to one which tracks a narrower range. On this basis, I believe that the politics of the present is inferior to the politics of the past.

The Blasphemy referendum is very much the politics of the present, let us call it Varadkarism, asserting itself. To a naive person, it would seem like confused priorities; why are we focussing on a defunct provision that isn't even enforced when we should be focussing on real issues like housing? But there is no confusion here.

To the people who determine what the political priorities are in this country (by definition the ruling class) blasphemy and the removal of any notion that Christianity is sacred in this land is more important and urgent that the fact that some people don't have houses or can't get houses. The support base of Varadkarism sees Ireland as some sort of beacon of liberal democracy for the whole world. It values that image very dearly, to the point of obsession. Because this base is well off - and it doesn't even include young professional couples looking to get on the housing ladder - it has the luxury of putting a premium on such an image.

Marriage equality, abortion, blasphemy - these are all premised on the idea that Catholicism, at least in a public sense, is the enemy. Under Varadkarism, ordinary people are mobilised around this phantom enemy. In this way, it is largely a politics of mass distraction.

I will not vote no in this referendum. Nor will I vote yes. I object to this referendum taking place at all. But I don't want to abstain as that would be akin to political apathy when I am in fact fully politically engaged. Therefore, I will spoil my vote. By spoiling my vote, I will be declaring my rejection of Varadkarism.

Some people say that if we objected to referenda because they are not urgent then we would never have referenda because there will always be something more pressing than a constitutional provision. This argument is not convincing. We vote on important constitution provisions all the time and quite legitimately in relation to EU treaties or even matters like creating a Court of Appeal or reforming the Seanad. Of course there are times when reforming the constitution is an important issue. Also, inserting a constitutional provision to the effect that water as a resource shall never be privatised is something that would have alleviated the concerns of reasonable people in relation to water charges.  Why was there no clamour for this?

Only in the most ideologically anti-Catholic sense could a toothless blasphemy law be considered a priority. But ideological anti-Catholicism is the key plank of Varadkarism.

Varadkarism

From the Taoiseach:

"Seeing the world's leading tech companies represented here tonight reinforces my belief that we are on the way to becoming the tech capital of Europe.

From being an inward-looking country at the edge of Europe, Ireland has become a multicultural and globalised country, a melting pot of nationalities, proud to engage with the world." 

This is as succinct an exposition of the ideology of Varadkarism as they come. The ideology of Varadkarism is of course bigger than Leo Varadkar the person; it is the culmination of many decades of state, social and economic policy in Ireland. In Varadkar, though, we have the embodiment of its very essence in one person. He is the face, the symbol, of the Zeitgeist. His political positions and outlook, his personal identity and story, the timing and international context of his regime, all serves to create this.

In the quote above, we see the two delusions at the heart of the ideology. The first concerns the laughable notion that Ireland represents some sort of tech capital simply because tech multinational giants are locating their operations here. This in itself is a metaphor for the fallacy at the heart of Irish economic model more generally, i.e. that when it comes to measuring economic development, the presence of foreign capital here is effectively the same thing as the successful cultivation of a native capital class and industry. If Dublin was truly a tech capital, we would see native companies leading the way in innovation. There is a big difference between a company that has its ultimate brain and soul in Silicon Valley, and one that has its brain and soul here. I don't mean to suggest that Ireland produce its own facebooks, twitters and googles - that is obviously unrealistic - but certainly that it produce a significant bulk of small to medium enterprises which aggregately employ people in large numbers. Yet, it is the multinationals that still employ the big numbers.

Varadkarism - and again it predates him personally - does not see the importance of the distinction between being dependent on foreign global capital and cultivating home grown native capital. And so, it equates international capital in Ireland with economic progress, when in fact it is closer to  a form of colonial subserviency.

The second delusion is so extensively propagated and so widely accepted that Irish people barely recognise it as a positive belief anymore and see it as a natural self-evident truth. It comes in many forms with many variations, but it is essentially the idea that Ireland was once a bad place and is now a good place, or a least a much better place. There is a usually a binary opposition between the way we were bad and good, and the binary opposition you use will depend on the context. So, if we were to talk about sexual freedom for example, we would say that Ireland in the past was repressed, prudish and victorian whereas Ireland in the present is open-minded, liberal and non-judgmental. If we talk about culture, Ireland in the past was stagnant, monocultural and inward-looking. Today, Ireland is dynamic, multicultural and outward-looking.

Why this berating of the past? There are two reasons. The first is that any ruling regime which is insecure about its legitimacy and authority will always first set out to denigrate its predecessor. The logic behind this is not difficult; by making the old rulers look bad, you automatically look better. You also create space for yourself and a narrative to give your regime meaning. So if we say that Irish society in the past was anti-intellectual, a present day regime can market itself as a champion of free inquiry and creativity. The second reason is that the particular features of Ireland's past, namely nationalism, Catholicism and agrarian democracy are so unfashionable in the world today that a past that contains them has to be berated. In the age the global metropole, these are quite simply dirty ideas that must be shamed at every turn.

But they are also unfashionable because they were dangerous. The Ireland of the past, characterised by a robust rural middle class, the effective ruling class, was too independent-minded and obstructive to capital markets. It's exactly the kind of place the plutocratic West fears. No matter, today we take it for granted that we are a people who have seen the light and have never had it so good.

The Political and the Church in Ireland

In his essay, the Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt defined the political as that part of discourse concerned with the distinction between friends and enemies. In the same way as morality concerns the question of good and evil, aesthetics the question of beautiful and ugly, economics the question of profitable and unprofitable, the political "denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation." (page 26).

The crucial point about the distinction between friends and enemies for the purpose of the political is that it is binary; it is so intense and divisive that there are only friends and enemies, there is no third neutral intermediate position. And the more you approach the intensity of this binary distinction, the more you are approaching the political.

So, if we look at Ireland in the past, the obvious enemy in a political sense was Britain, or the British Empire to be more exact. Our friends included the enemies of Britain, nominally the Germans during the First World War ("Gallant allies"), and later international entities such as the Catholic Church, the League of Nations/United Nations and the European Community/Union.

In relation to the Church, religion in Ireland came within the orbit of the political in the 19th century because catholicism provided a substitute national identity contra Britain. This happened within a larger context of British state politicisation of religion in the preceding centuries since the reformation. The British saw themselves as an essentially protestant people against the Popish European continent. They first mobilised this political protestantism in Ireland during the 1798 rebellion, cultivating Orange reactionism and laying the foundations for the Unionism of a century later. It was inevitable in this context that an Irish nationalism would have to make a big deal of its own catholicism. This is not to say that religion in Ireland was purely politically motivated, but rather that the political situation gave religion an added edge.

Fast forward to today, and religion is again politicised. However, the nature of the politicisation is radically different to before. First of all, the collective enemy in Ireland today is no longer the British. As a poster boy of the liberal world, the Ireland of 2018 would like to think of itself as being above such petty nationalism. We live in a global economically integrated country that increasingly identifies with a Westernised humanitarian internationalism. Our friends are those who support such an order and our enemies are those who oppose.

We now appoint ex-British intelligence personnel as commissioners of our police and worry that our presidential inaugurations will clash with a commemoration of the end of the First World War (since when do we care so much about this). We see the effects of this on perceptions of sport as well. "Foreign games" was a thing a hundred year ago, a real dead serious thing. Now, it's an embarrassing anachronism that is barely coherent. The context that gave this policy sense has changed utterly. We are no longer against Britain but something else. Who is our enemy now?

While religion is not quite the enemy here, it is certainly very close to being it. There can be no doubt that the West has become a cold house for religion. In today's West, the antagonism towards a certain religion is proportional to its incompatibility with the "Plato to Nato" narrative. The most incompatible is Islam followed by Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism and then mainstream Protestantism. The more religion is likely to cause to you to have an opinion which violates a trope of Western liberal humanitarianism, and therefore be "political", the more it is an enemy. "Plato" represents the idealised notions we have about pre-Christian Greco-Roman civilisation. 

If religion is close to being the enemy in the West, nationalism is equally close. As with religion, nationalism and the division of people into national groupings clearly disrupts global internationalism. "Nato" represents the idea of a multilateral world order promoting liberal democracy.

This is a double-whammy for catholicism in Ireland. It is close to being the Enemy of our politics for two reasons; the general anti-religiousness of Western culture and the historical closeness of catholicism in Ireland to nationalism. (The abuse scandals do not explain why catholicism has become of political import).

Religion was politicised in the past, but the politicisation was along denominational lines. Questions around divorce, homosexuality, abortion were totally uncontroversial because everyone here was equally against them. Furthermore, the Catholic Church's suspicion of nationalism generally prevented the the two in Ireland becoming fully synonymous.

Now it is the very idea of religion itself, and what are perceived to be the most extreme manifestations of it, that exercise people. This explains the phenomenon whereby people who have no interest in party politics, day to day current affairs or voting in general elections all of a sudden develop an intense interest in referenda that involve in some tangential way a skirmish with religion and especially the church. This is explains how a Government minister who is facing a crisis in relation to a cancer misdiagnosis scandal, a 'lesser' issue, can get a pass because of his performance in a debate involving abortion rights, a 'major' issue. This also explains why an online article about, for example, the budget will fail to attract anything like the number of views an article on, say, church involvement in education would. 

It's because we perceive the referendum or the online article as being more important and relevant to the question of the political that we are more attracted to it. Nothing riles us up like our enemy. Party-political debates about the budget or housing or social welfare spending simply do not attract this level of interest because they are deemed to be further away from the truly political.

It is often thought that modern society serves to depoliticise. But we are by our nature political animals. What has happened in modern society is that what is the political has changed. What really speaks to the sickness of our politics is that we have stopped seeing the most consequential issues as political issues and increasingly see more abstract issues as the most important. And so, a story about a hospital bed crisis brings about a collective shoulder shrug of apathy, whereas a story about a new hospital happening to be built on land owned by nuns causes hysteria.

Simon Harris plays to the gallery again

In response to comments by the Bishop of Ephin around artificial contraception, Health minister Simon Harris had this to say:

Please just make it stop! Increasing access to & availability of contraception is and will remain public health policy. Religion plays an important role for many on an individual basis - but it will not determine health and social policy in our country any more.

At a time when himself and the Taoiseach are under increased pressure in relation to the Cervical cancer scandal, Simon Harris has decided that it's time for a decoy. Knowing that church-bashing is in vogue, and still basking in the glow of the recent referendum victory, he's jumped onto twitter to lambast a Catholic bishop for saying something...well Catholic.

It is hard to think of something more inconsequential that the pronouncements of clerics on the subject of contraception in 2018 Ireland. But Harris, aware of the growing constituency of irrational anti-religious ideologues in Ireland, could not resist the opportunity to set out his cool secular credentials once again and in the process divert attention away from important issues. And the ideologues are already lapping it up.

The great irony of course is that Harris' comments in fact violate the principles of secularism. Let us recount what has happened here. A member of the clergy has expressed a view that the principles of the Papal Encyclical, Humanae Vitea, have been ignored for too long. In other words, a member of civil society is simply offering a moral opinion on something.

In response, Harris looks to close down any debate before it can even begin by prescribing the terms of the debate. So, he says that religion plays an important role for many on an individual basis but will not determine health and social policy anymore.

Hold on a second - is this not a democracy? Religion will play the role people want it to play (which as it happens is quite little at the present time) - that's not for Harris to decide. Afterall, if people have certain views of a religious nature and desire those rules to be reflected in the laws of the land, then religion, in an indirect way, will determine our health and social policy, whether Harris likes it or not.

And if some respond that in a secular republic personal moral views should not be forced on people generally, well that's what happens in a democracy or indeed any polity involving a social contract. Moral views are forced on people all the time. In the recent referendum to repeal the 8th amendment, the moral views of two thirds of people to the effect that the unborn child did not have the right to life was forced on the other third who believed it did.

Indeed, there is no such thing as a personal moral view. Moral views by their nature are views that apply generally to other people. If it does not apply to others it can scarcely be called a moral view.

What has happened here is that Harris has proclaimed a particular view to be off-bounds - "please make it stop" - before it is even debated because it emanates from a religious organisation and goes against his own view. It's the equivalent of somebody from a union proposing increasing the minimum wage and a minister responding in the following way:

Please just make it stop! Keeping minimum wage at current level is and will remain public finance policy. Unions play an important role for many on an individual basis - but they will not determine finance policy in our country any more.

Secularism is about separation of church and state. It does not mean that the church refrain from many comments of a moral nature (i.e applying to other people, the horror!) in the sphere of civic society. Telling the church to "stop" making such comments violates the principle of secularism as it involves the state going deep into the territory of public discourse and policing opinions.

Accommodating Unionists

The latest from Mary Lou:

Reflecting on what accommodations might be made for unionists if a united Ireland was to come to pass, the Sinn Féin president also indicated she would be prepared to accept a different flag and national anthem. 

“I, as with every other person who argues for a new united Ireland, will honour the flag of that island, will honour the dawning of that new opportunity and I would be proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with my fellow citizens, irrespective of religious creed, political background cultural background, irrespective of everything that has gone before. And I would proudly sing the anthem or anthems of that Ireland.”

Most of the focus has been on her comments in relation to the timing of a referendum on a United Ireland and whether it should be triggered by a hard Brexit.

The main question that arises for me though is why accommodations need to be made for unionists? Firstly, unionism is by definition opposed to an independent United Ireland (and let's not forget that implicit in the idea of a united Ireland is an independent Ireland). British unionism is incompatible and irreconcilable with the nationalist and republican idea of a United Ireland. It is perfectly valid to speak of ex-Unionists, Ulster protestant, the cultural British etc. But one cannot speak of accommodating unionism itself for that would undermine the very integrity of the Nation as a concept. The nation cannot include people who owe political allegiance to another nation over it, or subscribe to a political ideology that is inherently hostile to the nation.

Secondly, the notion of an accommodation suggests that Irish nationalism as it currently stands is not accommodating. Mary Lou speaks of a new Ireland, with new flags and anthems. But there would only be a need for new symbols if there was something wrong with the existing ones. This feeds into the classic slur against Irish nationalism that it is tribal, ethno-sectarian and essentialist. The flag and anthem, as representations of this exclusionary nationalism, are seen as problematic. This argument usually involves a false equivalence with northern Unionism. The solution is typically a modern, secular third way that transcends tribal divisions.

At the end of the day, though, the flag represents the ideals of the 1916 rising. I would invite people to show me which parts of the associated proclamation espouse principles that threaten Ulster protestants? If the flag or the anthem do not represent those people, it is because they themselves historically have chosen not to be represented by it because of the democratic and egalitarian principles it stands for.

There is no doubting the wisdom of getting Unionists to buy into a United Ireland, thereby becoming ex-unionists. While a majority of 50%+1 is all that is required, it would be ideal to get as many ex-unionists on board as possible. The language of accommodation is ill-conceived however, and the idea that the already accommodating Irish nation needs to somehow become more accommodating just to facilitate an already failing unionism is a nonsense. 

Fine Gael now happy to pick fights with the GAA

For some time there has been a clear anti-national trend visible in Fine Gael. Some will say, quite fairly, that the party has always been anti-national and anti-republican to some degree. But there can be no doubt that such sentiment has accelerated in recent times, with the implosion of the Fianna Fail,  the vanguard of nationalism, in 2011 and the rise of Leo Varadkar in 2017 and his brand of self-conscious uber-cosmopolitanism.

Firstly, we have the appointment of an ex-RUC chief constable with MI5 links to commissioner of the garda. It is remarkable that a party that sees itself as a by-word for national security and law and order could consider such a move to be appropriate.

Then we saw the increasing frequency of unnecessary visits by British royals to Ireland with much fanfare, starting with Prince Charles visiting Cork and Kerry, and then his son Harry visiting Dublin. This is part of a broader move away from military neutrality and the normalisation of the idea of Irish involvement in imperial wars.

Another trend is Fine Gael's systematic dismantling of the Irish constitution and the values it enshrines.

Not content with any of this, Fine Gael now want to give another great Irish tradition a bit of a kicking. The eagerness of Leo Varadkar, Eoghan Murphy and Brendan Griffin to jump on the anti-GAA bandwagon excited by the Liam Miller hysteria shows that the assault on nationalist institutions is taking on new dimensions.

Eoghan Murphy said that the GAA's rules are from an "Ireland that no longer exists". This is not so much a description as a political statement. The Ireland in which the national sport has a right to protect itself from competitor sports will exist as long as we want it to. By simply declaring that it no longer exists, Murphy implies it belongs to the past and therefore cannot be a part of the future. But of course it can.

Meanwhile Varadkar suggests that as a condition of state aid provided towards the re-development Pairc Ui Chaoimh, the GAA is obligated to make the ground available for use by the wider community, at least to some extent. This betrays monstrous ingratitude towards the GAA and indeed complete ignorance of the important social and cultural role it has played at community level over the years. The taxpayer has benefitted greatly from the GAA and continues to do so, so it could easily be argued that the €30m ought to be seen more as a token of gratitude for that service.

Even if we forget the benefits on the ground, the present policy of the state should mean a willingness to respect any tendencies of the GAA to protect itself from competitors. Afterall, the state is more than willing to use the GAA and its symbols when it suits when marketing Ireland Inc.

If hurling, and by extension Gaelic Games, are some sort of marker of our national identity, then surely it's only proper that we afford the custodians of those games a certain amount of respect?

Fine Gael, however, can't seem to help themselves these days. In the past, Fianna Fail by kept them and their national-phobia in check. Fine Gael would have been ruthlessly punished for any one of these things. With Fianna Fail a shell of its former self, and Sinn Fein desperate to portray itself as mainstream and non-tribal, there are no such checks in place now and they are free to run riot with their Cruiser-esque pathology.

In the absence of political constraints, the GAA has hit back. Its president John Horan described the intervention of Fine Gael ministers as "unhelpful" and noted how they seemed to see it fit to give the organisation a "bashing". The issue of the Liam Miller match is resolved, but the issue of grants and funding will go on. My guess is that Fine Gael will not be able to help themselves, despite the unwise nature of making enemies of the GAA.

Aftershocks of 2011

A thought recently occurred to me that 7 years on from the historic general election of 2011, we are still feeling its effects. Three recent events have led me to this view.

The first is the biggest; the repeal of the 8th amendment. The margin of victory begs the question as to why it took so long for repeal to happen and why getting to the point of repeal was so politically controversial and tortuous.

The simply answer to this is Fianna Fail (FF). FF were the pro-life party. They backed the 8th amendment in 1983, where FG were divided and Labour were against. Bertie Ahern's government sought to tighten the constitutional ban on abortion in 2001 (and lost by the narrowest of margins). The RTE exit poll from the 2018 referendum showed that FF voters were the most pro-life. 

FF were the political vanguard of the pro-life movement. And with their dominance came, amongst many other things, the domination of a pro-life point of view. So what happened to FF? Well, in 2011 Ireland's natural party of government imploded in spectacular form. The financial crisis crashed the economy and it crashed FF with it.

With FF swept from power, the space was made for a pro-choice point of view to emerge. I don't mean to suggest that the Irish people were really pro-choice all along, or at least since the X-case, and that FF hegemony repressed this.

The role of the party since the 60s was to reconcile a foreign direct investment-led liberal capitalism with the traditional national narrative. Its iconic leaders since the 60s - Lynch, Haughey, Ahern - were about making the old and new gel, ensuring that no democratic disenchantment emerged.

The economic and the traditional were always in friction with each other. When the economic model blew up, FF blew up with it. And with them, the careful balancing of old and new ended. Fast forward 7 years and the economy is back on track, but FF is only a shell of its former self. The economic now dictates everything, with no countermanding narrative to keep it in check. 

The second event is FF's endorsement of Michael D Higgins for re-election to the presidency. That this may be smart politics in the current environment is neither here nor there. The fact is we've come a long way since the days when the party practically owned the presidency.

The third event is the appointment of a British security agent to the role of Garda commissioner, something welcomed by FF. Again, probably smart politics, but indicative of the extent to which "the republican party" dances to the tune set by others rather than its own nationalist instincts.

Had FG won the 2007 general election on the eve of the crash, and had FF got back into power with a mandate and a majority to last them a decade, FF would be continuing to do what it used to, rather than following the liberal trends as set by others.

Interpreting repeal

Looking at the referendum to repeal the 8th amendment to the Irish constitution on 25 May 2018, there seems to be two basic interpretations of the final vote. I will call the first the hard interpretation and the second the soft interpretation. They are as follows:

The hard interpretation

The hard interpretation sees the vote as representing a fundamental shift in attitudes towards abortion since the 8th amendment of 1983. The RTE exit poll showed that only 22% of voters changed their mind on abortion in the last 5 years and only 17% of voters changed their minds during the referendum. Opinion polls in the run up to the vote showed yes with an average lead of 24%. While there was a consistent Don't Know of around 20%, the Yes core was so high that the Don't Know was not essential to passing the motion. Indeed, the fact that the Don't Know moved decisively towards Yes in the end itself a sign of how far attitudes had moved. Leo Varadkar considered this shift to be revolutionary.

Related to the hard interpretation is a view as to the meaning of the vote and how significant it was beyond the issue of abortion. Such a seismic shift on a such a high profile and controversial issue cannot be seen in isolation. The question of Repeal was just one battle in a larger war between two mutually exclusive worldviews. On the one side, there is what can be broadly called the liberal stance, and on the other side there is the conservative catholic stance. The catholic stance is not just simply a religious perspective - it also has a political dimension.

There is no coherent middle ground position. That is not the say that individual people cannot be sympathetic to both sides - there are of course catholics who like to see themselves as liberals. If they are, however, they must leave their religious views at the door. To be liberal is to see morality as a matter of individual choice (once the harm principle is observed). To be catholic requires seeing morality as universally applicable. To be secular is to support unequivocally the separation of church and state. To be catholic requires subscribing to certain core tenets that have political consequences like the right to life of the unborn.

According to the hard version, these two worldviews have been warring for decades, primarily though not exclusively through referenda, with the liberals increasingly achieving the upper hand.  The referendum then is part of a bigger narrative. The marriage referendum in 2015 was the last major battle in this war. Secularisation of the school system and referenda on blasphemy and the woman's place in the home will be the next. The two-to-one vote in favour of the 8th in 1983 as the last major catholic victory represents "peak" catholicism. The 1980s is Ireland was was perceived as a dark age. Varadkar himself described the vote as marking "the day Ireland stepped out from under the last of our shadows and into the light".  Others agree that this is about more than abortion, but see this as a cause for lament not celebration.

The soft interpretation

This version of events argues that the vote margins in both 1983 and 2018 suggest something more dramatic than was actually the case. The vote to repeal in 2018 was simply to replace the 8th amendment with a provision that the termination of pregnancy may be regulated by law. It was not a vote on the government's proposed legislation. If you start from the view that the 8th amendment itself was too extreme, then an overwhelming vote to repeal it is not in itself extreme but a conservative correction of sorts.

To support this view, the RTE exit poll for the vote showed that only 52% of voters agreed with the government's proposals to allow unrestricted abortion up to the first 12 weeks. This would suggest that a large cohort of repeal voters voted reluctantly because of the so-called hard cases and not out of a more general desire to liberalise the law. And if you combine this reading of the 2018 vote with a view that the 1983 vote exaggerated the level of "pro-life" support due to pro-amendment voters not intending the effects of the amendment in 'hard cases' such as the X case in 1992, then the transition from enactment to repeal does not seem so momentous at all.

Where the hard interpretation sees the vote as having a significance beyond the issue of abortion, as being a referendum on liberalism vs the Catholic Church, the soft interpretation avoids over-interpreting the result. Whilst there may have been ideological extremes on both sides, the moderate middle ground voted for Repeal with "a heavy heart". These voters were moved by the personal stories and accounts they heard of women travelling to Britain. Also, the No campaign was led by lay people who did not base their arguments on religion. Where the other version sees great upheaval, this one sees much latent conservatism. Just because a person may have a more liberal view on this issue does not necessarily mean that they buy into a more general liberal agenda. 

As alluded to above, there are people who happily self-identify as both liberal and Catholic. Indeed, if census figures are anything to go by, it is probable that most Irish people are like this. These people would believe that to take a stance on the issue is not to declare for one camp over another in a zero-sum culture war. Often pejoratively branded a la carte or cultural catholics, they don't harbour any particular bitterness or hostility towards the Church provided it keeps its nose out of politics.

Assessment

The RTE exit poll shows that the woman's right to choose and the life and health of the woman were the two dominant factors influencing people's votes. The hard cases were big factors too but not as prominent. 75% of voters always knew how they would vote. 52% of voters supported unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks and 38% disagreed. This is only 4% higher than the No vote, hardly indicative of a reluctant yes. Rather than a decisive middle ground flipping over on the hard cases out of a sense of "compassion", the numbers point towards a sea change in attitudes since 1983 in favour of a more liberal regime.

If we think about it, this should not come as a great surprise. Ireland generally has changed dramatically in recent decades on many levels. The most fundamental was the economic level, where the Celtic Tiger brought about new modes of behaviour completely alien to the Ireland of the past. In hindsight, it's arguably more surprising that the 8th amendment survived as long as it did. Afterall, it came from a time when contraception was something that had to be prescribed, when divorce was unconstitutional, when homosexuality was illegal. Looking at it this way, the shift in values that produced the result probably happened some time ago. The 8th was increasingly a relic from a past social order. Perhaps it took the collapse of Fianna Fail in 2011, the vanguard of nationalism, to finally clear the way for the liberal crusade of this decade.

The next question then is the significance of the vote beyond abortion. Is it correct to see this as part of a wider culture war? I don't believe it is possible to disentangle this vote from the general culture of individual freedom that has accompanied economic change in Ireland. The Celtic Tiger created a specific demand for professionals to service the increasingly complex foreign direct investment-led economy. This had numerous effects. Among them were the intense commodification of labour and the erosion of traditional gender barriers to employment.

In this context, pregnancy was increasingly seen as a potential encumbrance to a woman's full and equal participation in the workforce. The 8th was increasingly perceived as a patriarchal weaponisation of the unborn in violation of the woman's right to control her own body. It was a tool of subjugation no longer acceptable in the new Ireland. The RTE exit poll showed a correlation between class and pro-choice preferences. ABC1 voted 77% to repeal, CDE2 63% and F 53%. This would tally with the assertion that it was middle class professional women who spearheaded repeal.

Notwithstanding the above, this is a war that has effectively been over for a long time. Catholicism as a political force has been clinically dead since the 1990s. And even before that, in the 1970s and 80s, there were clear signs of decline. Liberalism is fighting its shadow. Catholicism is still deemed to exert political influence in certain areas such as blasphemy, the constitutional role of women and education. But any power here is residual and tokenistic in nature and has little effect on people's lives. At this stage, political catholicism is largely a bogeyman conjured up by liberalism to create an "us versus them" dynamic.

Conclusion

In summation, I will say the following:

- The vote shows that there has been a seismic change "revolutionary" in values. However, as Leo Varadkar said, it was the culmination of a 'quiet revolution' rather than a revolution in its own right. Middle Ireland is no longer the power broker it was.

- The vote was in essence an affirmation of liberalism, in this case expressed as the right to choose, rather than a pragmatic and reluctant vote for compassion. This liberalism should be seen critically as part and parcel of the economic transformation that occurred from the 1990s on.
- This liberalism is inherently incompatible with political Catholicism. However, political Catholicism has long ceased to be a serious force in Irish politics.