We are, as Michael McDowell remarked the other day, sleepwalking towards a Government-backed constitutional amendment which will confer protection of Cabinet secrecy without regard for the legal consequences of such protection. That is one issue; but there is another. In her interview on this matter on RTE radio's News at One, the Tanaiste Mary Harney condemned Michael McDowell for his use of sexist language in his statement.
The brute. The utter rotter. Pistols for two and coffee for one, my fine fellow, or else it'll be a sound horsewhipping on the steps of your club. Do you hear me? Using sexist language about a lady like Mary Harney? By God, sir if I could get my hands on you, I'd teach you a lesson you'll not forget in a hurry.
Before I carried out sentence, however, I thought it better to check up on what this bounder, this cad, this complete and utter tick, had said which was sexist. It is necessary to know these things before you decide to thrash a man within an inch of life. One would never want to be accused of being unjust.
Serious matter
I could detect only one reference which might refer to the sex of any of the protagonists in this matter and which could be regarded by the Equality Committee as being sexist. It is this. In an attack - described as "searing " - on both the Taoiseach and his party leader, Mary Harney, Michael McDowell is quoted as saying that the amendment was `the predictable consequence of running the country out of the hip pocket and handbag of Coalition leaders without consultation or reflection."
And that, I'm afraid, is the length and breath, width and girth, height and depth, of his "sexist" remarks: not worth disturbing an ant's egg for, never mind giving a fellow the flogging of his life. Yet this rebuke from Mary Harney about sexist language came in discussion of a serious matter, not in the context of the price of oxtails in Ballinasloe.
This is both preposterous and depressing. I have always regarded Mary Harney as a politician who is immune to the self-pitying whinges of the neurotic wing of feminism, someone who would take it as all part of the rough and tumble of political debate to have a reference made to her handbag. Yet there she was on the airwaves, quivering with indignation at Michael McDowell's sexist remarks. Dear sweet suffering handbags: is Bertie Ahern going to stand tearfully before a microphone if a woman TD refers to his "hip-pocket" as that bounder Michael McDowell did? Bertie, I promise you this: she will get the thrashing of her life from me if she does.
But is this the kind of thing we can expect in future from women TDs - that if any reference is made to the fact that they are women and wear women's clothes and might or night not be womanly creatures, it will be regarded as sexist? We know this kind of talk goes only one way: we know women politicians can refer to male attitudes, male opinions, male chauvinism - but men, on the other hand, must stick their hands in their mouths and smirk obligingly.
Substantive issue
To the substantive issue, m' lud: Have we not learned from the farce of the abortion referendum that amendments do not do what you want them to do? Amendments to constitutions are weapons to be handed to and honed by the least politically answerable and least democratically responsive group of people in the land: the lads on the bench. You can have no idea what you are handing these people when you pass them a constitutional amendment to play with and interpret.
Constitutions confer enormous power to judges, and those judges can make rulings far beyond the intentions of the framers of those constitutions. Sometimes those rulings, such as Brown vs the School Board of Topeka, Kansas, in the US are landmarks in the advance of civilisation. But it was never the intention of the framers of the US Constitution that it should be a legal weapon to confer racial equality.
The rulings of judges are not always so blessed by enlightenment. For example, our own contemptible little constitutional ruling that a terrorist who murders with a hand-gun outside the jurisdiction should not be amenable to extradition, provided that the murder is to advance the constitutional imperative of securing a united Ireland, constitutes a step backwards into a legal dark age and an ocean of moral barbarousness.
One can speculate about the consequences of the proposed constitutional amendment until the handbags and the hip-pockets come home. All our speculations will probably be unable to foresee the interpretations that a cluster of august judges will come up with; just as we all, without exception, failed to foresee the day that the Supreme Court would rule that the amendment on abortion would in the end make abortion lawful.
Bad law is one thing; it can be interpreted out of its awfulness by other and competing laws, by the body of case-law which a good barrister can bring to the notice of the court, and by the simple jurisprudence which sometimes and quite miraculously finds itself polishing the bench with the seat of its trousers.
Common sense
But imperfect constitutional devices can be boxes of matches in the hands of children, chainsaws in the hands of the unhappy. Good law and common sense cannot co-exist beneath the shadow of the vastly superior power of a constitutional imperative, especially one which touches on press freedom.
This is the nub, not handbags and hip-pockets. We have the least free press in what is called the free world. As it stands, every newspaper in Ireland spends fortunes fighting off libel actions; lawyers rock with joyous laughter at the very mention of our libel laws. This constitutional amendment could end up preventing the media telling you the truth about what the Cabinet has in mind for you - rather more important than hip pockets and handbags, you might agree.