Mary Kenny
It is important to know the full story before forming an opinion, writes Mary Kenny
We are all capable of overlooking complex facts when we are speaking about any issue. I confess, now, to campaigning on a particular subject quite vociferously when I didn’t know all the facts.
One of our campaign issues, when I was a young feminist back in the 1970s was about jury service. I was outraged to discover that women were not called for jury service in the Republic of Ireland. There were exceptional circumstances when a woman could apply to sit on a jury, but the very fact of applying might seem, in itself, suspect.
As a young woman, I thought this a dreadfully unjust example of discrimination against women, and indeed, it was. Are women worse judges of character than men? No way. Are we apt to understand the law a little less? Certainly not.
We campaigned to change this practice and so it was reformed.
It was only many years later that I learned the full facts. Women had been empowered to serve on juries when the Free State was established in 1923. Britain had just ushered in jury service for women (yes, there were some anxieties that ‘flappers’), with little more than jazz and cocktails on their minds, might bring a frivolous element to the proceedings) and the new Irish State followed suit.
Procedural
However, so many Irishwomen cried off jury service – declined to serve for one reason or another – that the then Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins decided it was simpler to exclude women altogether from jury duty. There was no great hullaballoo about this decision, which was almost procedural.
In other words – the full story was that the suspension of jury service for women in the Irish State arose from women’s own reluctance to do so.
A lot of people actually consider jury service a nuisance and a bore, and I’ve heard many conversations about how to avoid it, and get yourself rejected. (“Carry a copy of the Daily Telegraph, wear very formal clothes and start expressing loud opinions about law and order – you’ll be stood down by the defending counsel as being too right-wing. Off the hook!”) And it seems that Irishwomen in the 1920s were most particularly inclined to avoid this citizen’s duty.
The European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, last week made a speech at the Parnell Summer School claiming that women were “infantilised” in the Irish State within a decade or so of the Rising. Rights were taken away from women, and the Catholic Church was put in control of individual sexuality.
Upheavals
This is far from being the full story. Post-revolutionary societies are always socially conservative: Napoleon brought back domestic order and patriarchy after the French Revolution: Russian society returned to domestically conservative attitudes by 1924. After major upheavals, cultures crave a form of quietism and social stability. That has to be factored into the picture.
And how many of guidelines embraced by the new Irish State reflected the values of women themselves? Constance Markievicz herself was socially conservative – she abhorred divorce and birth control. She said so in the Dáil.
Ms O’Reilly is keen to advance the European Union as the fountain of all enlightenment, but as I had to learn myself, there are seldom simple answers to complex historical questions.
The morality of air war
On August 9, our parish in Kent carries out an Annual Remembrance of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in Japan in 1945 – it is always a very moving occasion.
I think I am coming to the conclusion that aerial bombing is nearly always morally wrong, whether nuclear or conventional. Fr Fergus O’Donoghue SJ has put up a picture on Facebook of a very small boy trying to shelter his baby sister from the bombs raining down at Aleppo. It would break your heart.
Where rejecting faith leads
John Halligan TD says that he doesn’t believe in God, but he does believe in aliens from outer space.
Surely this is the final confirmation of G.K. Chesterton’s observation that: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing – they believe in anything.”
Rejection of faith that has inspired so many great minds like Chesterton’s so frequently leads to ideas that are crankish, freakish and downright daft.