Socially-distanced congregation are pictured at the first public Mass on June 29 at St Patrick’s Church in Wicklow after the first lockdown. Photo: Susanna Braswell The View
November was the month the skies began to lift. In a year that for most people has been an endurance test there was some limited compensation in the fact that on average, despite incidents of flooding and high winds that brought trees down, the weather has been distinctly better than average, though not in all places.
As usual, the Covid-19 crisis lasted far longer than originally anticipated, but the extensive counter-measures embedded in an EU-wide safety net should tide us through to the point where a strong pent-up recovery takes over. The new normality will not be exactly like the old. We have learnt that there are other and sometimes better ways of doing things, but that certainly does not mean abandoning valuable activities that we have regrettably temporarily had to forego. Renewed and near-normal safe social interaction, when it comes, will be appreciated by everyone.
Few countries, including Ireland, succeeded in avoiding a second wave. But quite a lot has been learnt here. The death rate and hospitalisation were well down, and the alarming escalation in cases was arrested in time. The schools re-opened, and have largely remained open. There have been tragedies, but overall neither the health damage nor the economic damage has been as catastrophic as earlier feared. Despite lapses, community cohesion and discipline have been good. The Government have to balance the needs of health and the economy, which, except for the very short term, are more complementary than contradictory, but the community has to remain persuaded to stay with the strategy. In emergencies, personal liberties are curtailed for the common good, but they must be restored, once the emergency is over.
Level 3
A feature of the return to countrywide level 3 restrictions this week is that this time Mass and religious services will be allowed with limited numbers. If it is necessary to move back from level 2 over Christmas to level 3 in the New Year, every effort should be made to keep churches open. Religious practice makes an important contribution to the well-being and satisfaction with life of worshippers as well as to the wider wellbeing of the parish. Many places round the country only have a church, a school and a sports ground, where other facilities such as a shop, pub or post office are long gone.
Vaccination provides some prospect that next year the siege will be lifted. Health experts will determine the priorities, but once vaccination starts the incidence of the disease and the risk from it should begin to reduce for everyone. The discovery of vaccines has raised the prestige of university research, and in Germany underlined the value coming from the Turkish immigrant community now into its second generation.
Election
The sky has been lifting elsewhere as well. The level of participation in the US presidential election was very encouraging, and gives the lie to cynics who say that if voting changed anything ‘they’ would abolish it. American institutions have certainly been stress-tested. The populist wave in many countries in recent years and now receding should not be dismissed, but taken as a warning that the causes of alienation need to be seriously addressed.
The vital difference democracy makes is giving people the opportunity at regular intervals to change their rulers and political direction peacefully and constitutionally, without the necessity for either revolution or civil war. That does depend on those who contest elections being democrats willing to accept an adverse result. The level of partisanship in the world’s leading democracy, including systematic denial of the other’s legitimacy, has become extreme, and a far cry from when a Republican President Reagan worked constructively with a Democrat Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’ Neill. All-out political warfare, which led to impeachment proceedings first against President Clinton, then President Trump, is not healthy. A better domestic atmosphere and a return to multilateral cooperation are devoutly to be wished.
Joe Biden is proud of his Irish roots. He is only the second Catholic US President after John F. Kennedy, who lifted Irish morale, when it was badly needed, in 1963. There is no disguising that Catholic opinion is divided, here and in America, because of Biden’s support for the status quo on abortion and same-sex marriage. However, these are primarily matters for the individual states to legislate on, with the courts, including the Supreme Court, interpreting the law. So far, US presidents have seldom featured in these decisions. As experience in Poland and Irish experience relative to the ‘X’ case show, changing the law where potentially emotions on both sides of the argument can run very high is no easy matter.
For campaigners, support for their position is what matters. Others wonder whether candidates for supreme office should thereby gain a free pass with regard to everything else. Few of us here can identify with the composite slogan that appeared on a recent banner of pro-Trump supporters, ‘Pro-Life, Pro-God, Pro-Gun’.
There is the old thorny question, whether truly Catholic public officials are bound to implement the moral teaching of their Church in their executive decisions and legislative enactments. Debates about this do not always acknowledge that the function of law and of religious moral teaching is different, or that in a diverse society, as opposed to a largely homogenous one that independent Ireland was in its early decades, the degree to which religious values should be reflected in law and the constitution is a matter, following democratic argument, for judgment and consent expressed either directly by the people or their representatives.
Brexit has yet to be resolved, but the shift away at the last minute from creative destruction to more conventional norms of democratic government and administration at Westminster may help. No deal makes no sense. Devolution, however challenging to work, is indispensable in tackling both Brexit and Covid, which is running much higher in Northern Ireland than in the Republic, so that solutions for both can be best adapted to NI circumstances, including its border with the rest of Ireland.