Celia Larkin is an ordinary woman. Unlike Cherie Blair or Hillary Clinton, she is not a hotshot lawyer campaigning to change the world. Unlike Finola Bruton, she is not given to public pronouncements on the nation's moral fibre.
In any other era, her discretion and quiet public demeanour would earn her praise from church and State. She is the model of female modesty recommended by church fathers such as St Augustine - save that she is not married to her partner, the Taoiseach. No one is obliged to like Celia Larkin. But her position as the Taoiseach's official partner deserves respect. She never married, never had children and broke no rules. Other people might consider some of these a sacrifice.
Bertie said on Monday that Ireland is now a pluralist society. He was a little hasty. If it were, the row about recognising Celia as cohost of Cardinal Connell's reception would be the storm in a teacup it should be. Instead, it confirms how narrowly official Ireland interprets the term pluralist.
Monday was a chance to start repairing relationships between church and State. It was an exceptional opportunity for the Catholic Church, lambasted for its role in successive abuse scandals. The State showed its readiness to forgive, not forget, and to celebrate all the good things instead.
Hosting the reception for Cardinal Connell was a case in point. The man was economical with the truth in the Father Payne abuse case; his comments about the President showed at least a lack of understanding about her public responsibilities and insulted many people inside and outside his church.
The State could have reminded the Cardinal of such events. But the State preferred to celebrate him as a spiritual leader who regularly speaks of the need for better family support systems, condemns racism and urges Government to make housing and health a real priority. That's called moving on.
HOWEVER, the reciprocity doesn't cut both ways. Although Cardinal Connell did not make a public objection to Ms Larkin's presence as co-host, his colleagues' actions spoke for themselves. Every diocese in the country was invited to the reception, but only Dublin turned out. The question is whether they realise how their absence potentially insults the State. Or how the Cardinal's failure to thank Celia Larkin for co-hosting the event puts a knife to the notion of a pluralist state.
Cardinal Connell has spoken frequently of his hope that church and State can set up formal consultative arrangements for a full and frank exchange of views. But, like Celia Larkin, Cardinal Connell has not been elected to his position by democratic mandate. If his model of "differential citizenship" were adopted, then the individual rights of people inside and outside his church might come second to the pan-Catholic view he wants to represent.
Irish laws and attitudes remain close enough to that view, and its risks are sometimes hard to see. But there are fundamental antagonisms between recognising people's rights to belong to different churches and their rights as citizens in a pluralist state.
SOMETIMES the politically correct response when rights conflict is to keep silent, rather than interrogate them. It is certainly an easier position to adopt. Cardinal Connell is free from such correctness, sometimes delightfully so, this time inappropriately.
Indeed, if the State was as technically minded in applying its rules as Cardinal Connell is, then his own church, and some others, could be prosecuted in the courts under various sections of equality legislation. And if the church had been equally technically minded in applying State law over canon law, many paedophile priests would not have been allowed to continue exercising their ministry within the terms of canon law.
The Cardinal does the State some service in articulating his frustration at the whitewashing of issues he believes are fundamental. In his case, marriage, sex and the role of the family. That is only part of the general whitewashing damaging the path to pluralism, and frustrating people from all sides and ideologies who fear pluralism may mean suspending their own critical faculties or denying their right to free speech.
The need to discriminate wisely by asking hard questions in the right places caught both church and State on the hop last Monday night. Tomorrow in Abbeydorney and Lixnaw, for example, Fathers Pat McCarthy and Richard O'Connor will have to decide whether to give communion to the parents of first-time communicants.
That is not the State's business. If Bertie Ahern were to venture an opinion, he would be treading on the Cardinal's toes.
But the leading protagonists confused their roles at the Cardinal's party. The State faltered by making Ms Larkin take a back seat. The church faltered by failing to respect the State's established protocol as a separate domain. All in all, it may have been a useful event.
mruane@irish-times.ie