AFTER returning from a long stay in the US. I have noticed that the legal restriction of individual and social freedom, which is very advanced there, is proceeding apace in our republic also.
I mean a legal restriction of freedom which enters into the minutiae of everyday life, is promoted by politicians and the media and supported by the active or passive consent of a majority of citizens.
Previously the matters in question were left to individual responsibility and discretion, or to people, formally or informally, making arrangements among themselves. To, uphold the freedom of the individual, and of individuals acting collectively, was considered the right thing to do.
It was a specifically liberal virtue based on the assumed tendency of human beings towards good behaviour, and as such was considered appropriate for a liberal democracy. That underlying assumption seems to have been reversed.
In the name of higher virtue of various kinds, and in order to prevent the evils likely to result from people acting freely, it is now considered increasingly necessary to intrude the compulsive force of the State into our lives. In the teeth of scattered resistance, but with the new order winning steadily, the liberal State we inherited is being replaced by an authoritarian power more intrusive in detail than any church, and backed by police and courts to boot.
I began to notice this trend in February when a report appeared in The Irish Times about the banning of smoking in bingo halls. Working class women who played bingo regularly were complaining that "bingo is the only pleasure in our lives" and that smoking went with its "nail biting tension". They had petitioned against the ban in vain.
A few days ago, my growing awareness of what was happening peaked. I heard working class adults and children in north Dublin being interviewed about legislation which will have the effect of virtually ending the keeping of horses by such children. "What will the children do?" one adult asked, and I wondered anxiously what?
Between those two incidents, virtue rampaged. There was the campaign to make the reporting of child abuse mandatory for doctors and others, regardless of circumstances.
A coming law was discussed which would end the age old right of publicans to decide, at their discretion, who might not enter their pub. (There had been no popular demand for this law on the contrary, there is widespread appreciation of how Irish publicans maintain their pub's amenity on their customers' behalf.)
Next, a new law intruded into the management of restaurants. Restaurateurs were no longer to use their discretion in catering for their smoking and non smoking customers. They were ordered, regardless of the circumstances on any given day or at any meal time, always to keep at least half the tables free for nonsmokers.
And then came the frantic announcements in all media that anyone wanting to marry validly must give three months' notice to some state official. We were told this had to do with providing for divorce, and it became clear what the push for divorce by the politicians and media, united, had really been about.
The Power as Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities calls the hybrid power that rules us now wanted to take the management of, marriage away from individuals and their churches, and to subject that, to its control.
ALL that occurred in a mere three months, and I draw attention to the trend for two reasons. First, so that we will be aware of what we are doing and choosing, and not fool ourselves, as we sometimes do, that we still set high value on the freedom of the individual or of individuals acting collectively.
In order that justice and virtue of a higher order might be realised in Ireland, our local Power, and a sufficient number of us, want an authoritarian, virtuously intrusive State, not unlike Calvin's Geneva. And oddly, this seems to suit our mood and mentality better than America's, for there is nothing here like the organised resistance which there is there.
Second, I would suggest that, while we are getting what many of us want, we should not be naive about it. The State which has taken on, aggressively, the role of moral teacher and improver is failing in the basics, and the resulting bad conscience may well be a reason for its frantic display of virtue in peripheral or trivial matters.
The freedom of the streets and of open space has been shrinking and continues to shrink, particularly for women and children. Respect for human life has conspicuously fallen, and the special respect for women and old people is almost gone they are frequently beaten up, killed or raped.
Young men, seeing no point in life, often end it. Drug dealers are permitted to walk the streets, plying their wares to hopeless youth and criminalising them. There is no space left in the crammed jails. Many children conceived recklessly by teenagers and young women are aborted or have anguished, warping childhoods. All these are developments of the last 20 or 30 years and are becoming permanent.
The point about this, the bitter pill for our rulers to swallow, is that it's all occurring while the State has more control over citizens lives than ever before more money and police than ever before more power having pushed the church aside and delegitimised local social control to teach and inculcate virtue and supply life with meaning.
Faced with such fundamental failure in its dual role as orderer and moral teacher, there is nothing more natural than for it to make a great show of stopping women smoking in bingo halls, and poor children having horses, and publicans managing their pubs, and restaurateurs making their table arrangements, and people arranging privately to get married when they choose nothing more natural than to parade shocked horror about Sister Xavieria.
But to be fair to our rulers, one must add that nothing is more natural, either, than for ordinary decent people, like Irish Times readers, to deduce from the righteous noise, and the busy compulsion to good behaviour, that they live in the most virtuous society Ireland has known, and to preen themselves.
