Mary Robinson's New Ireland

...Answer: Yes...

...That's the subject of Mary Kenny's brilliant recent book, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland...

...But to the dismay of such divorce foes as Billy Binchy (Maeve's brother and a Trinity College legal scholar), she supported it with all the bully pulpit at her disposal, at one point saying, "Looking back over the last twenty years, I'm much more impressed with the changes in Irish society than [by] certain issues that still need to be addressed...

...There is, for instance, an unusual, almost liturgical, earnestness to the psychobabble one hears among teetotalers in pubs (which may also have something to do with the huge numbers of Irish people who, probably for genetic reasons, receive treatment for such psychological ailments as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia...

...Since then, government funding has been introduced piecemeal, but government control over schools has been asserted boldly in this decade, all of it in the direction of secularism...

...Costume drama is the French Revolution, it's...it's Regency England...

...Many Westerners behave as if that were true, and arguably most believe it...

...There have been a dozen more gay priest stories, and a couple more involving priests with offspring...

...Ireland never developed the institutions to mediate between the religious and the political that are enjoyed by other European countries where Catholicism has been less dominant: Catholic unions, Christian Democrat parties, Catholic sports clubs...

...Robinson and other politicians of the left had previously latched onto Ireland's "travelling people" —the semi-nomadic gypsies of the Irish west who were known as "tinkers" in pre–politically correct days—as an underprivileged class over whom to wax lachrymose...

...The "yes" side was favored by all the political parties, and backed with $750,000 in government funds...

...What's more, he did all of this on television, where he became something of a Phil Donahue figure...

...imperialism" in El Salvador when Ronald Reagan visited Ireland in 1984...

...They're scared of priests...

...She thought Ireland could produce more rock bands without producing fewer poets...

...Some would argue that all the prosperity is based on handouts—on the billions of dollars in "structural funds" the EU lavishes on traditionally poor member states like Ireland, ostensibly to build roads...

...To Quinn's mind, the New Ireland carries a lot of the intolerance and dogmatism that its apostles attribute to the Old...

...He has a point: The Irish bring an unusual piety to their "post-Christian ideology...

...In part, one can't blame them...

...Americanizing the Emerald Isle That is, Robinson —who, in the less diplomatic days before she became Mother of the Nation, once dismissed her country's folkways as "the stagnant pool of Irish life"—sought to remake Irish politics in the image of the American left...

...When her father notified the Irish national police to ask if the aborted fetus could be used by prosecutors for a DNA match, the girl was ordered back to Ireland and restrained from leaving the country for nine months...

...But practically every tendency by which secular Westerners live gets enunciated by the New Irish as a sacred principle, and with a particular boldness...

...For a short time, it is possible to imagine that the security and self-assurance of tradition can be maintained alongside the brightest and best of innovation...

...Oki 35...

...With even these tiny levels of immigration making the Irish so angry, one worries that Mary Robinson's first visit to Ireland as human rights commissioner may be an official one...

...When they talk in this vein, the Irish are not alluding to Intel's assembly plant outside of Dublin or Apple's in Cork...

...But most of today's work force was educated in a school system that is being consciously disassembled...

...It's also thanks to Robinson that Ireland has gay rights laws as liberal as any in Europe, for it was she, along with the flamboyant senator David Norris, who put a suit before the European Court for Human Rights that would have pulled the rug out from all of Ireland's subsidies if it did not bring its statutes on the matter into conformity with the other European countries...

...True, Ireland remains the most centralized government in Europe, far more so than even France, with most big business decisions in the hands of the Dublin government and the public sector of the economy taking up over half of GNP...

...Whatever the merits of the gay rights suit, Robinson's foes accused her of the kind of elitist jobbing of the legal system that has wrought so much harm in the country where she learned it...

...In the event, the government did little better: In 1993, when Smyth fled an extradition order from the North, prime minister Albert Reynolds— a self-made discotheque-and-dogfood magnate who comes out of the pious traditions of Ireland's largest party, Fianna Fail— failed to act promptly...

...high commissioner for human rights in Geneva—has become the moral symbol of the New Ireland...

...For the economic revolution going on pales next to the moral one —a source of exhilaration, optimism, and excitement, as well as instability, uncertainty, and occasional muttered warnings from the Old Irish of spiritual peril...

...It's a defensible argument, but the public would have none of it, particularly when the problems kept mounting...

...Again, the reaction has been as telling as the incident, with Irish people overwhelmingly calling on the church to revise its teachings on sexuality, rather than condemning the individual offenders for deviating from them...

...Defrocked Priests For the biggest change in mores is the declining influence of the Catholic Church...

...Kenny, a 196o's feminist who smuggled condoms into Dublin as a publicity stunt and introduced Mary Robinson to the Irish Women's Liberation Movement, supported many of today's changes thirty years ago...

...As gauged by such soundings, the Republic of Ireland has dropped behind the Protestant north in many measures of piety...

...She liked to say—indeed, it remains her mantra—that Ireland must "continue to open up as a modern society while retaining the Irish qualities...

...They stand out, they are even less popular than the Bosnians, and the papers are full of screeds about how they don't work and how the dole office is paying for 981 of them to live in bed-and-breakfasts while the Irish-born homeless are forced to sleep in less-cushy hostels...

...Ireland now has a tradition of immigrants that dates back to...oh, six months ago...

...The result is ironic: Rightly or wrongly, the Irish boast that their recent boom is due to their "educated work force...

...An uncharitable reading of Robinson's reign, then, is that it has been a Hillary Clintonesque mix of well-meaning mush, leftist social policy, and a tactfully dissembled loathing for Ireland as it has always existed...

...Everyone talks about the New Ireland, as if they've just come through a revolution, and those who defend the "Old Ireland" are considered beyondthe-fringe troglodytes...

...When a priest dropped dead in a gay bathhouse in Dublin in 1994, the two fellow-patrons who tried to resuscitate him were also priests...

...the preamble to its constitution still invokes the Holy Trinity...

...The country also has extremely favorable demographics for a European welfare state: with a median age of 25 and a free-falling birth rate, it has the highest ratio of workers to dependents in the EU, and this advantage is likely to persist for quite some time...

...Smyth was arrested in Northern Ireland and indicted for several incidents of "buggery" (still the legal term here, as well as the tabloid one) involving dozens of young children in his charge...

...So a more charitable explanation for Robinson's success is possible: Although a self-described socialist, Robinson has never been as interested in class issues as she has in gender, rights, and race...

...But Robinson never admitted to herself or to her people that getting to the New Ireland means parting with a way of life that, whatever its flaws, is old, noble, and in some quarters still much loved —and parting with it forever...

...The problem was how to energise commitment in a way that altered the whole equation....Analysing my sense of shame and outrage, I knew it arose from an inner sense of justice and equality...

...the church controlled all primary and secondary education...

...The American Spectator • November 1997 A Contrary Mary If that's true, then Ireland's revolution is one that's based not on the rights of man or on self-government, but on a bunch of grassis-greener misconceptions, and it is far too early to tell whether Ireland will consider what it gave up worth what it gets...

...Thus, while Ireland's voluntary unemployment rate is certainly zero, with every shop, pub, and construction site you pass pleading for workers and promising high wages, the rolls still show io percent...

...This is just about growing up...

...Be that as it may, for the first time this century, there is a sustained net immigration, most of it made up of Irish people returning home —this in a country whose leading export was always unemployment...

...David Norris, for instance, doesn't just say that gay people need civil rights...

...The Republic of Ireland that still existed in pockets even twenty years ago—the Ireland of saints and scholars, the "priest-ridden" Ireland, the Ireland that missed the Industrial Revolution and the Second World War, the Old Sod, Romantic Ireland—is dead and gone...

...This is costume drama...

...In 1995, when Cahal Cardinal Daly, Ireland's primate, went on a popular television show to present a conservative defense of the church's disciplinary steps in the sex scandals, he was booed off the stage...

...In conversations with young Irish people, one hears rabid anti-clericalism, full of invective and loathing...

...Nor is a politics based on ideology rather than patronage...

...But all of them have paled next to the case of Brendan Smyth, which obsessed the country for years, an obsession that ended only with Smyth's death late last summer...

...For throughout her presidency Robinson sought to have everything both ways...

...What frosted parishioners was the picture that emerged of church indifference and preoccupation with damage control: After every incident, it was revealed after the arrest, Smyth's Norbertine superiors had simply moved him to a different diocese...

...Costs of Prosperity Everyone is happy to see large numbers of Irish emigrants coming home to work, of course...

...Robinson is either deluded or Machiavellian...

...The catalyst for introduction of abortion rights was the 1992 "X" case in which a 4-year-old girl, pregnant from a statutory rape by a family friend, and suicidal, had traveled to England for an abortion...

...Costume drama is about ancient history...

...Given the Tammany-esque patronage traditions of Irish politics in which the party that paints the most houses and repairs the most windows wins, moral guidance is about the only thing the Irish haven't sought from the state...

...Kenny is clearly thinking of Robinson when she warns of the delusion that one can meld the security of tradition with the best of innovation...

...But if Robinson has something of Princess Di's power-politics-through-style about her, she also belongs to a type recognizable in the United States: the "rights agitator...

...It's tempting to see Ireland's change as merely the result of a country developing its economy, and the erosion of religion as a 32 November 1997 The American Spectator predictable — if late-arrivingfallout of prosperity...

...There's also a burgeoning drug trade...

...According to Kenny: The most optimistic period in which to live is when a conservative society is becoming liberal...

...Kenny notes that while the church was harsh, it was not insular...

...Throughout her term, she kept a low-watt electric candle burning in a window of the president's official residence as a sign of welcome for members of the "Irish Diaspora...

...every window that opens on a formerly stuffy atmosphere proclaims a new dawn...

...But the New Ireland is more revolutionary than evolutionary, due paradoxically to the church's very clout...

...When we left Nairobi and took the long flight to Paris, I lay back in the plane, closed my eyes and wept quietly for a long time...

...She wouldn't have been right in, say, 1980, but she is now...

...While it was rule-bound, many of its rules created a decent society, in which citizens were so scrupulously honest that they would write letters to devotional magazines asking whether it was a sin to have a bus ticket stamped twice...

...Growth has been over 6 percent for most of the last decade-10 percent in 1995—to the point where Ireland's GDP per capita now exceeds Britain's, according to OECD figures...

...But the government has been canny in putting all its eggs in the basket of high-tech industry, offering a generous flat tax of io percent to high-tech startups...

...One in ten Irish pregnancies now ends in abortion—lower than our rate of one in four, but still much higher than the Irish generally acknowledge...

...As David Quinn, editor of the weekly Irish Catholic, puts it, "It's impossible today to raise the slightest objection to any radical change going on in the country without being condemned as sectarian...

...with its far-flung missionaries and its links to Catholic Europe, it was probably the most cosmopolitan force on the island...

...Oh, this isn't costume drama," Binchy remembers telling her...

...Just as alarming as the incident itself was the insistence by several newspaper columnists and television personalities that the priest would have been far better off if he had "come to terms with his sexuality...

...He focused on animal 29 rights and "economic justice," and took the side of "liberation" movements in the Cold War...

...The order is pending appeal...

...Given the realities of immigration, which saw more women go abroad than men, Ireland has for almost all of this century been the only European country in which men outnumbered women—and sometimes vastly...

...Working to Robinson's benefit was a gender aspect to Ireland's politics, a tendency to view the church as a patriarchal institution that has systematically oppressed women...

...That would seem to be a money-seeking exaggeration, but some of the most spectacular killings in recent times have been drug- and gang-related...

...They have a reputation for idleness and dole-sponging—a thoroughly undeserved one, if the Bosnian Community Project, a storefront office on Pearse Street given over almost exclusively to job-search services, is any indication...

...But it would be hard to find a politician outside of Ireland who was actually willing to say it...

...Thus, in the wake of the Casey scandal, the church was inclined to attribute its problems not to any institutional stasis but, on the contrary, to a rogue figure from its touchy-feely fringe...

...Certainly the other political parties think her formula is a winner: all four of the party-picked and council-endorsed candidates to replace her in November's presidential elections are women...

...In 1986, she and other supporters of divorce had seen their referendum to introduce it blown out by a two-to-one margin, but in 1995, they put a second referendum forward...

...But Robinson proved masterful at the combination of television stunts and therapeutic policies that mark the Clinton/Blair age—and exerted a powerful liberalizing force through a number of disingenuous appeals that infuriated more traditional parliamentarians...

...Robinson loved the style of politics reigning on campus at the time...

...In 1972, Ireland removed the article in its constitution recognizing a "special role" for the Catholic Church, but such a special role continues de facto up until the present day...

...Robinson has played this constituency to the hilt, setting up Mna na hEireann (Women of Ireland), a network of clubs of influential women all over the country, who are her primary political organizing base...

...Any mediumsized town viewed from across fields appears as a forest of construction cranes...

...The U.K., in turn, looms less and less as an economic presence...

...Now, however, she's not quite sure what has been gained, and she is appalled at what has been lost...

...The girlfriend, distraught that Farrell was planning to move to Miami with his wife, then turned the gun on herself...

...For fear of riots, he was buried secretly by a handful of other priests in the middle of the night, by the light of a hearse's headlights...

...For even though abortion remains anathema and divorce divides the country right down the middle, Robinson has become the most popular—and most important—president in Ireland's history, with approval ratings at 93 percent when she left office...

...He says: "We Irish must learn that every person has a right to sexual pleasure...

...Nor did it ever develop any non-Catholic conservatism...

...Robinson's election was a fluke: One of the other two major candidates was a Dole-like place-holder...

...But however accidental the vote, Robinson has become a towering presence in the country, often compared—in her influence, if not in her politics—to Eamonn de Valera, the Irish Republic's Founding Father...

...Since minority issues are so amenable to TV-and-sympathy politics, these pols have taken to the new immigrants like ducks to water...

...What was curious was the way rank-and-file Irish Catholics reacted...

...The result is that this country, always unusually sensitive to women's wishes, now has a particularly radical, angry, and strident brand of feminism...

...These have come under attack from European Commission president Jacques Santer as "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies and "predatory taxation," and are likely to be frozen in the near future...

...Where does the prosperity come from...

...Thus Ireland —the only country in Europe never to have invaded another—gets political correctness without ever having had anything to be politically correct about...

...The sad rural bachelors of William Trevor's short stories, commuting to the pub on bicycles, are an Irish type...

...In 1992, Eamonn Casey, Bishop of Galway, was revealed to have had a longstanding affair with an American woman, to have fathered a child by her in 1974, and to have paid her tens of thousands of dollars in hush money out of diocesan funds...

...Separation of church and state is not a bad thing...

...Abortion, too, was legalized on her watch, although few Irish people and even fewer foreigners are aware that that is what happened...

...28 November 1997 • The American Spectator The American Spectator • November 1997 The country, as many of its natives say, is having its sixties, seventies, and eighties at the same time...

...This is at best an oversimplification, at worst an outright inaccuracy...

...Robinson and others have convinced the Irish that they ought to have a new, rich, televised, sexy society...

...She is the perfect embodiment of a generation whose political priorities are not answered by the old, hidebound, non-ideological parties, which date from splits in the Irish Civil War of 1921-23...

...Irish religiosity has not been gradually on the wane: It receded by tiny degrees between Vatican II and the late 1980's, but since then the bottom has fallen out of it...

...Even the most conservative and cynical Irishmen give her such accolades as "She helped us get over our national inferiority complex" and "She put us on the map...

...Robinson In the absence of the church, Irish people have turned to the state for moral guidance...

...And Paddy Farrell, the heroin kingpin of South Armagh, who had used IRA-linked guerrillas as smugglers and enforcers in that border area, was assassinated by his girlfriend while blindfolded for a sex game...

...She claimed a special role for herself in the Third World on the grounds that Irish missionaries have done so much for Africa, yet repudiated any teaching role for the church in her own country...

...Descended from both the Catholic and Protestant Irish upper classes, graduate of a Paris finishing school, she studied law at 30 November 1997 • The American Spectator Trinity College but first became active in politics while attending Harvard Law School in 1967 and 1968...

...In August, Smyth died of a heart attack...

...But a desire for American-style democracy does not seem to be what's driving the process into zealotry and excess...

...There are several thousand Bosnians in Dublin, and the indications are they are not being received 34 November 19 9 7 • The American Spectator graciously...

...More likely the impatience has been created by years of being shut off from sex—that lifeblood of Western economies and cultures —while being bombarded by MTV and other advertisements for a more open society...

...That same week, Irish police asked Britain to extradite John Gilligan, the largest marijuana importer in Dublin, for assassinating a Sunday Independent investigative journalist who had written about him...

...It was in the wake of this event that Robinson forwarded a bill to the Supreme Court stipulating that young women would be permitted to travel outside Ireland for abortions if there was a "probability" that the life of the mother was in danger—from anything, including suicide...

...Earning Green This type of do-your-own-thing regime is, of course, easier to carry on in prosperous times, and to one who has been away from Ireland for longer than a decade, the prosperity is positively alarming...

...She broke into tears after a visit to a Somali aid camp, and actually published her diaries from the trip, which amount largely to an analysis of her emotions: I had called for lateral thinking, for a new vision towards the peoples of Africa...

...There are no lines on the roads in this movie...

...Ireland is still the most religious European country...

...I felt it was right to weep because I was grieving for the pain of a whole people....And then it was time to prepare for the visit to the Secretary-General of the United Nations...

...The extremism that Ireland's poets used to brag about—Yeats's "excess of love" and "fanatic heart" — has not disappeared, it's just been delivered up to the service of a new religion...

...The resulting ridicule came less from any resentment towards the girl than from the thought of how desperately Robinson's staff must have scoured the country to find her...

...Even in rural County Kerry, pubs where you can drink espresso, eat insalata caprese, and watch "Seinfeld" on an 84-inch TV screen are not a rarity...

...The Irish are willing to pay an ever higher price for change...

...At this moment, it still has its moorings and its self-confidence...

...Ireland now looks and feels like America or Europe: Dublin's Grafton Street, even in the 198o's a hodgepodge of fancy department stores and seedy knickknack shops and fish-n-chippers, has been bricked over for pedestrians, much like the main drag in an American "latte town...

...Casey had been the most prominent post-Vatican II leftist in the Irish church, one who repudiated the fire-and-brimstone of his predecessors in order to "modernize" the institution...

...Across the country, housing prices have doubled in the past decade, and in Dublin they've tripled, to an average cost of close to $15o,000...

...This moral-monopoly problem leaves the church unable to play any role in the New Ireland without scaring people, and education is not an isolated case...

...Its landscape—Burger King, the Body Shop, Patagonia is one that any Valley Girl would recognize...

...She delighted in the new Irish-language television station, and seemed to find nothing droll in the fact that it spends much of its day airing rap videos...

...She collected dozens of honorary degrees and had a thriving line in African misery...

...As her fawning biographer Lorna Siggins puts it, "The clash between the [American] culture she had just come from and relished, which expected young people to get involved and to contribute, and [Irish] culture, was total...

...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL is senior writer at the Weekly Standard...

...One can admit that the old Ireland was conservative and quaint, Kenny says...

...Fine: there's no reason their wishes should be subordinated to those of a few wistful foreigners who want the country to remain quaint and archaic for tourism purposes...

...One afternoon, an actress took the author aside and told her how much she loved to do these old costume dramas...

...To which the actress replied, "Your youth is ancient history...

...the other was found days before the election to have sought in the previous administration to suborn the very office he was running for...

...New Class, New Politics And yet, there appears to be a large measure of no-means-yes in the Irish electorate's stand on sexual issues...

...Dublin itself is reminiscent of some of the fairy-tale development stories one reads about Southeast Asia, and business analysts refer to Ireland unfailingly as the "Celtic Tiger...

...And because the Old Ireland is now being so systematically demonized, we can't know yet what the New one will look like...

...For the fact is that the "Irish qualities" she's talking about are anti-modern ones...

...But that doesn't mean the current purging of Catholic influence on Irish life is either fair or advisable...

...People ride horses and buggies...

...Robinson has a pitch-perfect understanding of the television-age politics that was exposed by the heartfelt grieving over Princess Diana...

...But polls show Mass attendance has fallen by a quarter since the early 1980's, and in European Union "values surveys," Irish scores are plummeting on such indices as belief in the afterlife and belief in the soul...

...Two decades ago, Ireland had no public school system, properly understood...

...This year's entering class at the national seminary in Maynooth will produce only an estimated eighteen ordained priests—roughly a tenth of the level of thirty years ago...

...Since joining the European Union in 1973, Ireland has been the cheaper of the two EU countries that speak English, and as the global economy has grown, speaking its language has been an increasing boon...

...For a short time, people have the best of both worlds, before the stability of the old dissolves and the anxieties of the new invade...

...There has been a worrisome increase in violence in the country, with a record number of murders in Dublin this year...

...Then there are the approximately 1,000 Central Africans who have arrived in Dublin since the turn of the year...

...For the erosion of the church's "moral monopoly" creates not just a moral vacuum but a logistical one as well...

...Of the two girls chosen to bring flowers to Robinson's official farewell, one of them was African-Irish...

...In the early 1970's, as a senator for Trinity College (under Ireland's wacky representation system, senators are elected by the students and faculty of both Trinity and University College Dublin), Robinson set as her priorities the introduction of divorce, contraception, and abortion—all of them illegal at the time, and all of them legalized under her presidency...

...Enter Mrs...

...But since her election in 1990, President Mary Robinson—who stepped down in September, two months before the scheduled end of her seven-year term, to become the U.N...

...His coalition partners bailed out on him, and his government fell...

...They're less happy to discover that there's no reason for this influx to be limited to those who were born here...

...In September, a legendarily violent enforcer for Dublin's Italian chip-shop mafia was knocked off...

...It has thus been tempting to chalk it up to a backlash against a few spectacular priestly scandals in the last few years...

...Social workers estimate that there are 7,000 heroin addicts in Dublin...

...These grants, now at about 3 percent of GNP, have been as high as 7 percent over the last twenty years, and could be said to underwrite both the business tax breaks and a continuation of Ireland's preposterously generous welfare state...

...The most stunning evidence is the wealth of the place...

...People see and hear so much of their leaders that they begin to mistake them for close friends, judging them on the basis of assumptions about their charm, or glamour, or niceness, rather than any beliefs they might hold or policies they might follow...

...Robinson was not allowed to endorse the measure...

...Even the most vitriolic and influential attack on church power, Tom Inglis's 1987 Moral Monopoly, holds that the essential link in Irish society was one between women and priests to shut the country down sexually...

...But, to update Chesterton, once you stop believing in the church you'll believe in whatever the chicest ideology on television is...

...It was he who led the discomfitingly large protests against "U.S...

...every improvement seems for the best...

...Since the early 1980's, Ireland has gone from doing half of its foreign trade with Britain to only 25 percent—with other countries in the European Union making up 45 percent...

...Robinson, who made her career as a member of Ireland's Labour party (a largely academic tendency that has virtually no laborers in it), won by a narrow plurality...

...It's about my youth...

...Contraception was legalized in 1979 under strict regulation, but wasn't freely available until 1993...

...The Irish seem to be under the impression that while they've been living in poverty with their huge families, the increasingly childless Occident has been spending all its money on mistresses, new cars, and trips to Spain...

...Constitutionally, the president is not permitted to speak on policy issues...

...In the rinky-dink market town of Mallow in County Cork, there's something on the main drag that looks very much like a strip joint...