We love republicanism, writes Fintan O'Toole. We will stand up for it, applaud it, salute it, weep for it, shout for it, and some of us will kill and die for it. We will do anything, indeed, except understand it.
Nowhere is the intellectual barrenness of Irish politics more obvious than in the absence of even a minimal understanding of the history and meaning of the republican ideal to which all of our largest political parties subscribe.
In the debate sparked by the Taoiseach's recent attack on "aggressive secularism", the one thing that is clear is that a lot of people, including the Taoiseach, don't get one of the key concepts of republican democracy - what Thomas Jefferson called the "wall of separation between church and state". What they don't get is that the wall was built, not to keep religious people out of public life, but to protect the freedom of conscience of all citizens.
In his speech to the elegantly-titled Structured Dialogue with Churches, Faith Communities and Non-Confessional Bodies (the tortured language a reflection of the intellectual contortions surrounding it), the Taoiseach twice attacked the idea of secularism.
One was a typical exercise in empty rhetoric, setting up a straw man so he could knock it down again. "There is," he warned, "a form of aggressive secularism which would have the State and State institutions ignore the importance of this religious dimension.
"They argue that the State and public policy should become intolerant of religious belief and preference, and confine it, at best, to the purely private and personal, without rights or a role within the public domain. Such illiberal voices would diminish our democracy. They would deny a crucial dimension of the dignity of every person and their rights to live out their spiritual code within a framework of lawful practice, which is respectful of the dignity and rights of all citizens."
Language often gives the game away, and it is worth noting the linguistic sleight of hand at work here. In the first sentence, we are dealing with an abstract concept - aggressive secularism. In the subsequent sentence, this abstract concept is referred to as "they". The bad grammar is good spinning. The "they" who are intent on persecuting religion and denying people's rights to live according to their beliefs, are a free-floating, undefined entity. This is, of course, because they don't exist. There is no one in Irish public life arguing for freedom of religion to be restricted. So Bertie Ahern's "aggressive secularism" is a rhetorical invention designed to make secularism itself into an aggressive, repressive philosophy.
The Taoiseach's other reference to secularism was: "It would be an irony of history if Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter, having each experienced exclusion at some phase in our history, should now be bound together in a shared feeling of indifference from a secularised state." The real irony is that, for centuries, the struggle of Catholics and Dissenters - of everyone who was not a member of the established church - was precisely for a state that would be indifferent to religious persuasion. The United Irishmen, of whom the Taoiseach may have vaguely heard, struggled for a republic in which citizenship, not religion, would be the basis of a person's rights. This indifference is at the core of republican democracy.
It is not an abstract concept. I lived for much of last year in China, where the greatest desire of many religious people - Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Muslim - is precisely for Jefferson's wall of separation between church and state. They would be delighted if the state became indifferent to their spiritual lives. They would recognise - as the Irish Catholic bishops of 19th century America did when they argued for secularism - Jefferson's argument that "state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion".
We should recognise it too. We know only too well that when Christ and Caesar are hand-in-glove, religion suffers almost as much as democracy does. If you want to see Jefferson's "corruption within religion" at work, look no further than the Ireland from which we are only now emerging. For centuries, the Church of Ireland was thoroughly corrupted by its position as a state church, which turned it into an instrument for repression. Then the intertwining of church and State gave us a society in which women were incarcerated for life without trial in Magdalen homes, children were enslaved in industrial schools and church leaders lost the ability to put morality ahead of power. Irish Catholicism has paid a fearful price for the absence of a secular democracy.
Instead of attacking a non-existent campaign against religious freedom, the Taoiseach should be facing up to the real challenges of governing a pluralist democracy. Our church-based education and health systems are in crisis, partly because the State has used religious control as a way of avoiding its own responsibilities to provide essential public services to all citizens. With the churches unable to run those services and the State still scared of embracing secular democracy, we get the worst of both worlds. A republic might be a good idea.