Mary Kenny“Equality can make things more complicated in practice, however just it seems in principle”, writes Mary Kenny
The Law Reform Commission has asked for submissions from the public in relation to Section 117 of the 1965 Succession Act.
This is all about wills. Specifically, it’s about opening up the subject of offspring who feel they haven’t been given a fair share of a parental will.
Wills have always caused trouble in families, whether they didn’t exist (the person died intestate) or whether they did (the person allocated the worldly goods unfairly, allegedly). And I think I’m right in saying this was particularly so in Ireland.
The now defunct Irish Ecclesiastical Record – it was published from the 1860s until the 1960s – used to carry a regular feature in which priests wrote to bishops or other ecclesiastical authorities for guidance about especially knotty problems that had come up in Confession.
Sex? Seldom mentioned – the rules, I guess, were clear. Marriage? Now and again (sometimes, if the matter was delicate, the answer would be in Latin). Far and away the most complex questions involved money and particularly deathbed Confessions relating to wills.
Robust responses
Before facing the Final Judgement a man might confess that he had falsified a will to “cheat my cousin out of a farm”. The bishops, by the way, were quite robust in their responses: any property obtained dishonestly must be returned to the rightful heirs and successors – with interest, if need be.
The complications, today, of second wives and partners, or children born of other unions outside of a marriage, making a claim on an estate will be enough to fill the lawyers’ briefs for years to come – with the accompanying prospect of handsome legal fees.
Equality can make things more complicated in practice, however just it seems in principle. The English system among the landed classes was, and remains, primogeniture: the first-born gets everything. It was (and still is) terribly unfair, but it prevented arguments about inheritance. (It also kept great estates intact.) If the first-born was a reckless fool, that was the lottery of life. The second-born just had to go to Australia as a jackaroo.
Most parents, I imagine, want to be fair to their children, and treat them equally. But when it comes to wills, it ain’t always that simple – as those anguished last Confessions vividly testified.
Poor hospital hygiene standards
I don’t know enough about hospital administration to judge whether the National Maternity Hospital should share a location with St Vincent’s Hospital. But I have heard it remarked many, many times that “if the nuns were still in charge of hospitals, there’d be no cross-infections, no slipshod hygiene, no dirt in corners”. Indeed. The Holles Street NMH has been found wanting, in more than one report, for its poor hygiene standards.
Politics is still a tough old game
Reasons to support Hillary Clinton in the American presidential election include (a) her depth of political experience (b) her well-intentioned efforts to set up a free health care system in the US (c) she’s a woman, and a grandmother (d) and she did, after all, ‘stand by her man’, when many an American wife would have divorced Bill during his naughty times.
Is this not what a Christian wife should do? Interestingly, her age – she’d be knocking 70 if she enters the Oval Office – is seldom mentioned. That’s because Americans don’t seem to mind about age.
Yet the prestigious New York Review of Books has carried a devastating critique of Hillary, written by Zoe Heller. Hillary’s “gender strategy” has failed, writes Ms Heller, because most young women prefer Bernie Sanders. Much of Mrs Clinton’s career as a lawyer, it’s claimed, is “shady, or shabby, or unprincipled”.
The evidence that the Clinton Foundation has received large donations from corporations and foreign governments is “troubling”; taking $675,000 (€584,000) from Goldman Sachs in speaking fees is hardly edifying; nor is her “long-standing habit of crying sexism when she wishes to dodge or deflect legitimate questions or criticisms”.
Finally, no praise is given to Hillary for “standing by her man”. The real question is: “whether she had decided to put up with his infidelity in the interest of furthering both their political fortunes”.
Tough old game, politics, and if you’re going in for it, you need to be a tough old gal.