Another belated State apology for shameful deeds

Last Tuesday, we did it again. A State apology was offered to a previously marginalised group of Irish society who had suffered terribly, an, in some cases, fatally, at the hands of a brutally cruel system.

In the Dáil, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan offered that apology to the members of Ireland’s gay community who were criminalised prior to 1993.

The debate marked the 25th anniversary of that law change, and one was struck by how this was yet

another shameful episode being accounted for because of this country’s deeply poisonous and insidious relationship with religion.

Yet again, because of the stranglehold of the Catholic Church, granted in the past by feckless politicians, a modern-day government has had to mend a wrong.

This week, it was the gay community. But it has been the survivors of Magdalene Laundries, the victims of child sex abuse at the hands of priests in schools, the victims of the mother-and-baby homes, and on and on.

The pattern is all too familiar. The creed of a cruel and hypocritical Church, adopted by a fragile State, which ended in misery and untold suffering for those who did not fit into the ideal image of what it meant to be a Catholic.

On Tuesday, during the debate prompted by Labour senator, Ged Nash, the Taoiseach spoke eloquently of isolation of those to whom he was apologising to:

“The laws [of previous decades] were very much dogmas of a different time and they dictated how we treated and mistreated our fellow citizens, our brothers and sisters. It is oppressive to live in a constant state of humiliation and a constant state of fear. It is also deeply traumatic to feel that one is rejected by one’s own country.”

As the work of Professor Diarmaid Ferriter has shown, between 1940 and 1978 an average of 13 men a year were jailed for homosexual offences. Between 1962 and 1972, there were 455 convictions.

“I was born in 1979, and in the three years before that, there were 44 prosecutions in this country. It is not all that long ago, and it is very much in living memory. Homosexuality was seen as a perversion and trials were sometimes a cruel form of entertainment for the media and the public.

"Others saw it as a mental illness, including the medical profession at the time. For every one conviction, there were a hundred other people who lived under the stigma of prosecution, who feared having their sexual orientation made public and their lives and careers destroyed as a result,” Mr Varadkar added.

He spoke too of Declan Flynn, murdered in Fairview Park in Dublin - his only crime was being gay. Attacked viciously by five young men, one of whom shouted: “Hide behind a tree, We are going to bash a queer.”

Present in the edges of the Dáil chamber for the debate was Senator David Norris, the man who led the campaign for homosexuality to be decriminalised. Repeatedly mentioned during the debate was the case Norris took to the High Court, the Supreme Court, and then on to Europe.

But particularly highlighted was the majority judgement given by the then Chief Justice, Judge Tom O’Higgins, in 1983. Fianna Fáil leader, Micheál Martin, said the judgement “may well be the worst in that court’s history”.

He did heap praise on one of the two dissenting judges at the time:

“Even then, a mark of a brighter future could be found in the powerful dissent of Mr Justice Niall McCarthy. A deeply committed believer in the rights and republican motivation of the Constitution, McCarthy tore apart the idea that imported Victorian morality and legislation should negate the personal rights guaranteed to citizens of this Republic.”

Martin’s justice spokesman, Jim O’Callaghan, followed a similar line of argument, during his contribution: “I also acknowledge the role and presence of Senator Norris, who similarly took a case, which went as far as the Irish Supreme Court.

The decision in that case, as Deputy Micheál Martin stated, is a blemish on the Supreme Court’s record. Having read it again, it is, unfortunately, the case that the Supreme Court failed in its duty to recognise that the enumerated and unenumerated rights of Irish citizens included the right to privacy and sexual privacy.”

As I was not familiar with the judgement, I found it online and downloaded it. I have read it half a dozen times since Tuesday evening. It is appalling, grotesque, and is a severe black mark on the record of the Supreme Court.

“O’Higgins’ majority judgement has a strong claim to be one of the worst the Supreme Court has produced. Not only did it reject Norris’ claim on a right to privacy and uphold the constitutionality of the laws on homosexual acts, it did so without citing a single case of the Supreme Court or High Court in support…instead, drawing heavily on vague and largely unexplained natural law concepts, and the Christian tradition, to denounce homosexuality as a suggestible condition that was immoral and wrong,” wrote Ruadhan Mac Cormaic in his excellent book on the Supreme Court.

O’Higgins’ argument boiled down to the following five points:

• 1) Homosexuality has always been condemned in Christian teaching as being morally wrong. It has been regarded for many centuries as an offence against nature and a very serious crime.
• 2) Exclusive homosexuality can result in great distress and unhappiness and can lead to depression, despair, and suicide.
• 3) The homosexually orientated can be importuned into a homosexual lifestyle, which can become habitual.
• 4) Male homosexual conduct has resulted in the spread of all forms of venereal disease.
• 5) Homosexual conduct can be inimical to marriage and, per se, is harmful to it as an institution.

He went on to say that: “It cannot be doubted that the people, so asserting their obligations to our Divine Lord Jesus Christ, were proclaiming a deep religious conviction and faith and an intention to adopt a Constitution consistent with that conviction and faith and with Christian beliefs”.

Norris lost in the High Court, and in the Supreme Court mentioned above, but won in 1988, in the European Court.

In 1993, Maire Geoghegan Quinn was the minister for justice who brought the decriminalisation of homosexuality legislation.

In 1995, this country voted to permit divorce, by the slimmest of majorities. Just 9,000 votes.

In 2002, the people voted to allow women the right to travel for an abortion, as well as the right to information.

In 2015, Ireland became the first country to vote by way of a plebiscite to extend the right of homosexuals to marry.

In May of this year, by a margin of two to one, this country voted to permit abortions in this country.

The Catholic Church opposed every one of those steps, which have helped Ireland be a more tolerant society.

Within 48 hours of the abortion result being confirmed, two of the Church’s most senior leaders, Primate Eamonn Martin and the Bishop of Elphin Kevin Doran, both acknowledged the Church was now a minority force in this country.

Given the damage it has done to this country in the past century, I simply say amen to that.