Moral Order and the Liberal Agenda in the Republic of Ireland

Since 1925, laws and attitudes regarding sexual morality in Ireland have changed. ¹ Since the mid-1990s, sexual minorities are now being accepted and integrated into the society of the Republic. Public debate now centers on the Celtic Tiger economy and its social effects, on asylum seekers, on intolerance toward racial minorities, on the child abuse, and on the financial scandals that have undermined the authority of both church and state in Ireland. Events that raised issues of sexual morality generated headlines at the time, and rocked the foundations of Irish society, especially the McGee and X cases of the last decades. This reconsideration of those events is prompted by an intime conviction that Ireland was not as inherently conservative and as fundamentally different as it liked to believe itself.

In January, 1990, Desmond O'Connell, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, referred to homosexuality as an "objective disorder." The archbishop's term caused a stir in public opinion. People thought he was saying that homosexuals were suffering from a disease, since this was one of the meanings of the word "disorder." In fact, he was actually using medieval scholastic terminology, according to which anything that corrupts moral order is a disorder. The ideology at the basis of this moral order condemns individualism, on the one hand, and emphasizes the duties that the individual has vis-à-vis the community and God, on the other. By extension, certain courses of conduct, such as homosexuality, corrupt society at large because they undermine the family, the basic unit of society whose main function is to maintain both economic and ideological order. The fact that Irish people did not understand--or would not accept--what the archbishop was saying showed that Irish society no longer spoke the same moral language, and no longer recognized the normative morality that had been, until then, imposed by the institutional Catholic church. At this point, Ireland appears to have exchanged an overtly Roman Catholic concept of sexual morality, hegemonic for over a hundred years, for a pluralist vision.

The concept of natural law underlies the rhetoric of order and disorder, and it is still in force for some today. It rests mainly on two principles: first, one must do good and avoid evil; second, objective and self-evident moral values enable human beings to distinguish between the two. The Catholic church adopted this as its official doctrine in 1879, and to this day it still endorses natural law as the foundation for obligatory moral law. It insists that man, having been corrupted by original sin, needs the church's dogma and a set of immutable principles to find the proper direction in life. This was reiterated as recently as 1994 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The natural law, the Creator's very good work, provides the solid foundation on which man can build the structure of moral rules to guide his choices. It also provides the indispensable moral foundation for building the human community. Finally, it provides the necessary basis for the civil law with which it is connected, whether by a reflection that draws conclusions from its principles, or by additions of a positive and juridical nature.²

Generally, Protestants subscribe to a different theory of natural law, which for them is solely based on individual human reason. They do not need the mediation of their churches to discern it, as these do not give out instructions but guidelines and do not play a mediating role when it comes to salvation. Moreover, Protestants believe in the supremacy of free conscience, informed by reason, rather than a rigid doctrine. In a state like the Republic of Ireland, with its Catholic majority, Protestants as much as other believers--and nonbelievers, for that matter--were ruled by natural law, as interpreted by the Catholic church. Relations between Christians and the state are not fundamentally disapproved of by Protestants, for they recognize that...