The Taoiseach has not recognised that for many who stood by the Republic, it was necessary to clash with the Catholic Church, writes Jaime Hyland.
The Taoiseach's opinion article in last Friday's Irish Times is worrying.
He seems to have entirely misread the demands of those who have called for an end to the special relationship between the church and the State. He defends both institutions against accusations that no one is making, while ignoring completely the seriousness of what has happened in Ireland over the past couple of weeks, and its implications for his representative role as Taoiseach.
He is adamant that both he personally and the Government have worked hard on child abuse, but nobody seems to be arguing with him on that.
Indeed, he and his Government have been almost universally commended on finally starting a process of investigation that may lead to the uncovering of the greatest child-protection scandal in the history of the State.
There are not many either who doubt that the Government is now ready to put together laws to ensure that neither criminal activity of this scale and type nor the appalling cover-up that accompanied it ever happen again.
He assures us that no one is above the law. Fortunately, he's mostly right there too - or so it seems - though Ferns has made it clear that very senior church figures were still attempting to hold their priests immune to normal criminal responsibility until well after the declaration by Ruairí Quinn that the Ireland was "post-Catholic".
The Government is to be commended that these attempts failed and the law was enforced, if only tragically belatedly.
He feels "It would be a deep disservice to the good clergy and religious and an act of moral cowardice not to recognise [ their good works over the years]."
No one would disagree with him here either, but his article completely ignores those whose commitment to the Republic, to their non-Catholic compatriots, to their children or to the children of others led them to clash with the church over the years.
These clashes all too often resulted in the ruin of their careers, sometimes in the destruction of their family life and far too often in effective forced emigration and lifelong bitterness. At a time when one would expect that such opponents of the unquestionable power of the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland are finally, belatedly and still painfully slowly, beginning to be vindicated, the Taoiseach still cannot find a word of thanks, apology or even of understanding for them. Taken in the context of his silence on the thousands of Irish people who worked outside or opposed the church over the years, his remarks are deeply wrong in their tone, in their balance and in their timing. He informs us that: "The notion that the institutional church has not been held to account is misconceived."
At least as far as the abuse that went on in residential care, the misconception is his. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Woods deal will result in the taxpayer paying as much as 10 times the cost of compensation as the religious congregations will.
He has repeatedly asserted that the State could not run the education system without the church. This is nonsense, firstly because nobody is demanding that the church should be immediately expelled from every school building in the country, and secondly because the need to update our almost exclusively denominational system to the demands of parents for a more non-denominational schooling can be done with imaginative legislation and firm Government action.
If the church should wish to resist the clear desires of Irish parents and if Ireland is to deserve the name of Republic, then its wish should simply be ignored. None of this implies that the those parents who want their children to remain in Catholic schools should be forced to make any change. It is difficult to credit that, as a politician who claims to have a special interest in the weak, he takes up the cudgels in defence of one of the organisations in Ireland least in need of his protection.
Think of some of the organisations with a vested interest in what the Taoiseach has had to say on religion: One in Four has been chronically underfunded since its foundation; Educate Together gets a paltry €40,000 a year; the tiny organisations that attempt to represent the views of the non-religious such as the Humanist Association of Ireland depend completely on membership fees and paltry private donations, and then there's the Catholic Church.
Which does the Taoiseach choose to defend? Astoundingly, he opts for the one organisation in the list that is in receipt of millions of euro of taxpayers' money, wields unparalleled influence in Irish academic life, can count on tens of thousands of committed defenders, is the biggest private-sector owner of real estate in the country, receives regular free spots in the media to propagate its views and has direct access to a legion of sympathetic journalists and politicians willing to do its spinning for it.
The Taoiseach will claim that he is just adding balance to the discussion. He is not. He is attempting to bring the debate back to the traditional Irish assumptions that religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, for all their faults, are effectively the only legitimate sources of moral guidance in Ireland.
Mr Ahern's comments on religion seem to equate belief in religion with moral direction, unselfishness and concern for humanity, while lack of religion is associated with materialism, selfishness, consumerism and ethical thoughtlessness.
The argument for this view was never very strong and has been further weakened by recent revelations about the misdeeds of Ireland's religious leadership. It is about time that the Taoiseach and his friends, at All Hallows and elsewhere, gave it up.
Jaime Hyland is a member of the Humanist Association of Ireland