When church and state divorce

Ireland's people have shown that they want to move forward, but cautiously, says Conor Gearty

The separation between church and state in Ireland, for so long merely theoretical, has finally ended in divorce. Friday's vote to remove the country's constitutional prohibition on divorce may have been by the narrowest of margins, but government by referendum allows no middle ground between victory and defeat, and the change will have as much constitutional and legal weight as if the vote had been unanimous. The significance of the result extends far beyond its subject matter. Since the adoption of Eamon de Valera's new Irish constitution in 1937, the country has ostensibly enjoyed secular self-government in the Anglo-American democratic tradition. Though never designedly a theocracy, the divorce prohibition was only one of several clauses that recognised (in the words of one provision not removed until 1972) "the special position" of the Catholic Church in this new independent Ireland.

In the decades that followed 1937, lay politicians might have seemed to be driving this new vehicle of state in accordance with the democratic wishes of all its passengers, but this was only because the church was choosing their route. This entirely suited the bishops; why go to the bother of driving when the people could be relied upon to elect professional chauffeurs? What the church desired was legislated into life; what it disliked quietly disappeared. Its hold on the Irish imagination was such that no coercion was required; the legislators, being good (and therefore obedient) Catholics, could not help themselves from translating the Catholic Church's will into law.

This arrangement had begun to fray well before this weekend's result. In 1973, Ireland entered the European Community, with all its Godless Catholic countries to provide a bad example. The following year, in a decision with momentous implications at the time, the Supreme Court struck down a law that banned the importation of contraceptives. The pace of reform increased in recent years, with the Irish Parliament recently enacting liberal gay laws that would have been unthinkable only a decade before.

Despite such changes, the divorce referendum was still pivotal because it was the first opportunity for the people themselves to adjudicate in a clear contest between church and state. Earlier referendums in the Eighties on abortion and divorce had been muddied by splits in the political ranks as to the right stance to adopt. But for this referendum all the mainstream political parties were firmly in favour of change. So were most of Ireland's national newspapers, and almost all its cultural and artistic celebrities. It was a case of the church and Ireland's "cultural defenders" against the rest, with the church being additionally handicapped by the succession of scandals that have swarmed around it in recent years, further emasculating its already shrinking authority. In fact, so disgraced are the bishops in Ireland that the anti-divorce groups operated almost entirely independently of them, and their hardline intervention was thought even by those who opposed change to have been uniformly counter-productive.

In view of all this, the really interesting question is not why Ireland voted yes, but why it so nearly voted no. Of course, the defenders of the status quo had simplicity on their side. It is far easier to shout "Save the family" at a political rally than it is to explain why you want people to be free to do something you admit you see only as a last resort and which you probably disapprove of anyway. Also, in the last few days of the campaign, the anti-divorce groups played a legal card to great effect, arguing that the change was certain to have momentous implications for the property rights of "first families", something that was strongly but not necessarily effectively rebutted by the government. Nevertheless, whatever one argues about its legal and constitutional authority, to win by 9,000 votes on a turnout of more than one and a half million voters is hardly a clear political mandate for change.

As the campaign progressed, divorce became less a tangible proposal than a linguistic battleground over which to fight for a nation's soul. The paradoxical consequence of Friday's near electoral stalemate is the delivery of a clear, albeit negative, message as to how the Irish people do not want the future to develop. On the one hand, there is clearly no stomach for a nostalgic drive into the cruel, stifling certainties of the past. On the other, there is genuine and profound concern at drifting into a culture that is as free of ethics and moral responsibility as it is of authoritarian priests and nuns. This was no Irish vote for the Sixties, three decades after the event. The voters showed that while they wanted to put the church in its place, they were quite certain that it had a place.

Despite all the scandals and disgrace that surround it, the Catholic Church remains absolutely central to Ireland's sense of itself as a nation, as a place where respect for others, whether they be in the family, the parish, the village or even the city, continues to weigh just as heavily as the more Protestant sentiment of individual autonomy. In its richest manifestations, the church stands for a vision of a society that is caring, charitable and solicitous towards the poor. As Ireland hurtles towards the premier league of nations, with a fast growth rate, low inflation, falling unemployment and the EMU club beckoning around the corner, this church-inspired vision of itself is a comforting guarantee that not everything has to change. As Britain and other Western nations experiment with communitarianism and other ideas, in an effort to fill the moral vacuum at the heart of their societies, the Irish have shown themselves too sensible casually to dispense with their home-grown version of that which other countries are now so desperate to invent.

It is this that makes so heartbreaking the tragically bad leadership that the Irish church has had to endure for so long, with endless middle- aged episcopal dullards pontificating on women and sexuality when far better and more enduring messages lie readily to hand, and when far better and more intelligent men and women stand ready to deliver them. If only the bishops were as intelligent as the flock they try so unsuccessfully to hector.

The result of the referendum means that it is the church, rather than the Irish people, which is at a crossroads. The Irish are determined to advance, with the church preferably, but without it if necessary. It is the church that must now decide whether it wants to be the spiritual partner in new Ireland's experiment with the future or whether it is content instead to be an irrelevant, negative presence on the sidelines, ignoring the positive aspects of change but croaking "I told you so" at every misfortune on the route.

The divorce between church and state may have finally come through, but a better governed, more humble and more human church could still win custody of the nation's soul.