A senior Irish churchman has said the removal of references to God in the Constitution wouldn't worry him "in any way" and that the document's preamble was "pretty meaningless".
Speaking to The Irish Times yesterday, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Most Rev John Neill, said the Constitution ought to be "a secular document", similar to the EU constitution and that in a multicultural Ireland, when it came to cherishing our identity, he would be "very happy" with an acknowledgment of the State's heritage.
The archbishop felt that the emphasis in the Constitution should be on "recognition of the role and name of religions in society rather than on pledging the country to any one religious expression." Where the majority community was Christian, it was obvious that ethos was going to influence the framing of society anyhow, he said.
It did worry him that some commentators were now saying the dominant Catholic ethos of the Constitution in the past had never been used in a negative way where other denominations were concerned. He recalled "the Tilson case". In 1950 Mr Tilson, a member of the Church of Ireland, placed his children in a Protestant home so that they could be raised as Protestants.
His Catholic wife took a High Court action against him. The then president of the High Court, Mr Justice Gavan Duffy, ruled that Mr Tilson was obliged to raise his children as Catholics as he (Mr Tilson) had given a written promise to do so.
This was demanded by the Catholic Church's 1908 Ne Temere decree which stipulated that all children of a mixed marriage must be raised as Catholics.
As further justification for his decision, Judge Duffy referred to Article 44 of the Constitution, which recognised the special position of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The children were ordered to be returned to their mother.
Mr Tilson appealed to the Supreme Court and lost. Three of the four judges presiding upheld the High Court decision.
The dissenting judge and only Protestant among the four, Mr Justice Black, wondered whether the court would have ruled differently had the marriage promise favoured the Protestant party.
The consequence of that case was social isolation for many Protestants, particularly in rural areas, Archbishop Neill said. "Those [ Protestants] who grew up here in the 1950s did feel they lived in a confessional State," he said. All that had changed greatly in intervening decades, not least with the removal of Article 44 from the Constitution in a 1972 referendum, he said.
Of the preamble to the Constitution he said "I don't think it's necessary." It begins: "In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,We, the people of Éire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ . . ." etc. But he would not vote to remove it.
He strongly opposed the introduction of work permits in Ireland for citizens of new EU states and described as "a blight on humanity" practices by certain shipping companies when reducing labour costs.
The archbishop also felt Fianna Fáil candidate Mary O'Rourke's reference to "blacks" at a convention in Mullingar on Sunday did not indicate any deep prejudice, but that we were not yet sensitised enough to inclusive language.
Dr Neill also felt there was less evidence of racism in Ireland. There had, for instance, been little negative reaction to his New Year's Day call for immigrants who had been in Ireland for five years to be allowed stay.