SPRING IN

Welcome on  the first day of Spring.

The  Irish Spring Festival goes back a long, long way , before Christian times, and is still celebrated in traditional ways in many places in Ireland. The most powerful survivor of those pre-Christian times is Brigid , who successfully passed from pagan times into Christian history as saint Brigid - a passage responsible for many of our Irish customs , names of people,places, wells, mountains, times of the year , language and much else. The Irish co-existence  of "pagan " and "Christian" is a sign of Irish willingness to integrate and share and compromise with enjoyment ; historic accommodation of  willing people with each other is written into the words, seasons, hills, wells, language of Ireland. Nice thought. If we integrated Pagan and Christian so thoroughly we can respectfully enrich our political lives now with many differences and evolutions....................

This year we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of women voting - for the first time women were voting as themselves instead of simply offering their wisdom to men and hoping they would  vote on their behalf.  Women  had to struggle hard for that. The very name " suffragette" shows what many people thought of women voting. Through many years if you were an actor and a woman you were an actress,you might  be not a poet but a poetess, not just a suffragist but a suffragette ,each of the words either giving or being given a - this is hard to define -  a meaning of something lesser, as if somehow a poetess or  an actress might just be somewhat less than  poet or actor.

Times pass and in the slow movement towards  courtesy and recognition words change and the meanings of words change too. Slow movement of change is one thing, the painful even agonising process of making change is another, people had to march, go to jail , be force-fed and  insulted as police locked the handcuffs which were a sign  not of safe citizenship but of outlawed criminality. Interesting, the same word is used for setting slaves free and setting  Catholics free from penal law and setting women free from lower status in the human community - emancipation. Daniel Ó Connell  is hailed by many Irish people as The Liberator and Catholic Emancipation his triumph. But it was a limited freedom he won, a freedom for some, not for all. That idea of freedom for all has still to come and  flourish. He did the best he could in his day. We should  do much better in ours. .

When Mr De Valera was drawing up the Constitution  for one part of Ireland - in 1938, another commemoration this year -  he was under tremendous pressure from some people in continental Europe to name the Roman Catholic Church a state church in Ireland like the Anglican in Britain. He refused. Instead, the Constitution stated merely that the RC Church had a special position in the new State simply because  it had more adherents than any other kind of Christianity. It was a clever  way of doing something but at the same time doing nothing.

In that Constitution there was another provision saying , broadly speaking, that women should not be forced by economic necessity to work outside the home " to the harm of her duties in the home", or words to that effect. That provision of the Constitution eventually became a source of public opposition  and like the article about the position of the Catholic Church had to be changed. But the article saying the RC church was the church of the majority of the people really said nothing much and what it said about women was that they should not be forced to work outside the home. One  article was intended to fend off advocates of state churches by giving them a sop , and the other  article could have been used to defend families from exploitation by merchants and industrialists but both were  in public discourse understood as attacks on non-Catholics and women. Many workplaces  in Ireland were employing and exploiting more women than men.  If the Constitution had specially forbidden the exploitation  of women for profit and granted them  recognition of their right to have control of their choice of work and the conditions in which  they would do it  that would have been a different matter.

Adjustments to Constitutions are difficult  because people's perception of what they mean or should mean changes. Like the civil or religious insistence on indissoluble marriage , what might be a basis for safeguard could, in changing circumstances,  be seen and experienced as an intolerable hardship.

So this is an interesting year in which we remember not only the good changes but changes that could have been better and  the pain good people endured to make them. Descent into chaos may sometimes come suddenly, but change into beauty is always a  slow job of work. So with laws and constitutions.

Happy Springtime into brilliant Summer perhaps ?