This shouldn’t be coming from me, but what the presidential election really needs is a candidate I wouldn’t dream of voting for: a serious conservative Catholic. There are enough uncommitted members of the Oireachtas to nominate one. It is important for Irish democracy that they use that power.
The presidency boils down to two things: morale and morality. By morale I mean the nation’s capacity to feel proud of the person who represents us to ourselves and the world. The president should be a class act – dignified, articulate, impressive and possessed of sound judgment about when and how to intervene in controversial issues.
But the presidency is also about morality. The last three holders of the office – Mary Robinson, Mary McAleese and Michael D Higgins – have turned it into a touchstone of collective values. The president now functions as the licensed conscience of the nation. If the morale part of the job is about making us feel good about ourselves, the morality part is about making us feel uncomfortable about ourselves by reminding us of the principles we purport to hold.
It is striking in retrospect that the importance of this second aspect of the presidency rose in inverse proportion to the decline of the Catholic hierarchy. The bishops used to enjoy what the sociologist Tom Inglis called a “moral monopoly”. They were the central bank of our non-monetary values. Everything to do with good and evil, right and wrong, was traded in a currency that only they could issue.
READ MORE
That currency underwent a drastic devaluation in the 1990s as the long-term consequences of social change collided with the sickening scandals of past and current abuse. As fewer and fewer Irish people looked to cardinals and bishops for guidance on ethical questions, the presidency moved into the vacuum. The president became a secular cardinal – not quite as well dressed, but with the considerable advantages of being potentially female and democratically elected. It is from the Áras rather than the episcopal palace that the nation receives its benedictions and its admonishments.
And, within the limits imposed by the Constitution, this manoeuvre has been a great success. Our day-to-day politics have become narrowly pragmatic, managerial and almost value-free. When it comes to the vision thing, we are governed by people who should have gone to Specsavers.
With the Church losing all moral authority and secular rulers devoted merely to shooting the rapids of daily events while slaloming around difficult choices, the presidency has been the only consistent voice for the articulation of higher aspirations.
If the Republic still has a soul, it hovers somewhere around the president. So the question to be asked as we face into the election is whether or not traditional Catholicism has any claims on that soul. Surely, at the very least, it has the right to be heard.
An obvious element of the current crisis of democracy is the feeling among significant part of the population that no one listens to them or speaks for them. That feeling is sometimes justified, sometimes concocted. But it is potent – and democracies ignore it at their peril.
The calamitous fall of Irish Catholicism has been so dramatic that it occludes what ought to be an obvious fact – there are still a lot of orthodox Irish Catholics and people of other faiths who share their views on issues such as abortion, homosexuality, gender and marriage. Three-quarters of a million people voted against equal marriage in 2015 and against repealing the constitutional ban on abortion in 2018.
These are not only our fellow citizens – they are also citizens who overwhelmingly accepted with good grace that they lost a fair contest. That losers’ consent is crucial to democracy – if you don’t believe this, just look at what has happened to the United States in its absence.
[ Why are people in their late 20s and 30s so disillusioned with religion?Opens in new window ]
It should be recognised, too, that these believers are having a very hard time. Their practice of their faith puts them increasingly at odds with the Irish majority. Consider a stark statistic – according to a recent Amárach survey for the conservative Catholic Iona Institute, more Irish people have a positive view of astrology (18 per cent) than go to Mass regularly (16 per cent). More check their horoscopes (23 per cent) than read the Bible or other religious works (18 per cent). Believers are becoming estranged from the norms of the society around them.
Yet it is also evident that most Irish people recognise that there are things of value in the broad heritage of Christianity. Fifty per cent have a positive view of Christianity compared with 21 per cent who view it negatively. While most of us have a negative attitude to the Catholic Church as an institution, 45 per cent agree that “Despite the scandals, Catholic teachings are still of benefit to Irish society”.
A presidential election is one of the very few times we get to tease out in a formal arena what collective values we want to inform the public realm. As things stand, it seems unlikely that any candidate is going to be allowed to enter that arena to make the case for what was, until very recently, the State’s overwhelmingly dominant belief system. If this is so, are we not in danger of replacing one moral monopoly with another?
Peadar Tóibín of Aontú has been trying to gather 20 nominations from among the 30-odd uncommitted Oireachtas members to get Maria Steen on the ballot paper. I profoundly disagree with Steen about most things but she performed a vital democratic function in the equal marriage, abortion and care referendums by being an able, articulate and patently sincere advocate for the conservative side. She would be a strong and stimulating presence in the presidential debates.
Those of us who are secular liberals have always stood against the silencing of minorities and we should do so now. The political system has a duty to let a variety of voices be heard in this contest – not least because, when social conservatives lose the election they will have reason to consent to its outcome.
