Image: The White Cliffs of Dover - the archetypal image of Britishness - or Englishness? Rights: Immanuel Giel/Wikimedia, CC 3.0
The Britannic archipelago has seen two referendums in the last two years: the United Kingdom’s EU referendum in 2016 and the abortion referendum in the Republic of Ireland in 2018. Both concerned profound existential issues. In both the combatants were divided, not just over the questions on the ballot papers, but over identity and meaning – over the weight of the past and its implications for the future. In both, voters had to ask themselves what sort of country they wanted to live in and what part they wanted it to play in the wider world. Both aroused strong passions; in both hope warred with fear, the future with the past. But there the similarities stop. One was a triumph; the other a tragedy.
‘Changed utterly’
The second referendum – the 2018 abortion referendum in Ireland – was the triumph. It signalled an astonishing break with the past history of the Irish Republic. When I first visited southern Ireland as a sixteen-year old schoolboy in 1950, the country was dirt poor: for the first time in my life I saw people begging in the streets. I didn’t then realise that the constitution of the Irish Republic privileged the Catholic Church over all other denominations; and that the Catholic church of Ireland was one of the most reactionary, intolerant and oppressive in Europe. It was still De Valera’s Ireland; and the preamble to De Valera’s constitution, adopted in 1937, explicitly stated that the people of Eire acknowledged ‘all our obligations to our Divine Lord Jesus Christ, who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial’. A later article declared that the state recognised ‘the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of its citizens’. Other faiths – even the Jewish faith – were to be tolerated, but their adherents would be second-class citizens.
