Ecumenical Farmers Speak Out

This Business of our President taking Communion in a Protestant church has given rise to a lot of clamour about the alleged blurring of religious identities.

The thin end of the wedge comes to mind (the thick end appears to have no known function).

Monsignor Denis Faul accused President McAleese of breaching canon law, which applied in the same way to "the Pope in Rome and President McAleese as much as it does to Paddy and Biddy Murphy."

This came as news to Paddy and Biddy Murphy when I checked with them, yet they accepted it was so.

But religious identity is not the only identity under threat. Just the other day, 400 shellfish harvesters joined the Irish Farmers' Association. At one stroke, land and sea identities were forever blurred.

Very little media space was given to the uproar created by this dramatic development.

While the shellfishers were welcomed at a Dublin reception attended by the Minister of State for the Marine, Mr Hugh Byrne, and the IFA president, Mr John Donnelly, the objectors gathered outside.

The principal spokesman, Mr Ercus Kelly of Farming Morality, argued that the whole unity of the IFA was based around the bullock, while that of the shellfishers involved the periwinkle, the oyster, the barnacle, the prawn, the mussel and so on. To mingle beef with shellfish was to establish a very dangerous precedent: "The bullock is central to the IFA. That is why there is still only one IFA, and about 30 or 40 Protestant - beg pardon, shellfish organisations."

Mr Kelly added that while fisheaters were occasionally also meat-eaters, this did not mean the crossover was all right. He recalled an old scholastic tag from pre-conciliar days, favorabilia sunt amplianda, meaning that one could always turn to an obscure Latin phrase when all else failed.

Another protester, chicken farmer and lay theologian, Joachim McDonnell, told the Irish Times that "there is a law against this sort of thing, but if shellfish harvesters want to commit mortal sin and risk spending eternity in Hell, that's their business. But on the overall issue of inter-communion between fish-eaters and meat-eaters the focus should be on the occasion of people being together, rather than just on the elements of fish and meat.

"I would say Hugh Byrne was not committing a sin, but John Donnelly should know better. He was around in the days of the penny catechism."

Mr Donnelly is of course a devout meat-eater but has reportedly eaten shellfish before and has "absolutely no difficulty" in doing so again. We at The Irish Times feel that his presence at the reception and his address of the crucial "open table" issue should be seen as a statement of reconciliation, a generous and conciliatory gesture to shellfishers nationwide, even though they are obviously the poor relations.

In pre-conciliar times severe spiritual penalties attached to fish-eating by the farming community.

A very hard line was laid down by the 1966 encyclical Tut-Tut Unum Sint, published by the Old IFA. The conditions for a meateater desiring to eat shellfish were that the person must greatly desire it, freely request it and manifest a faith in keeping with his own tradition while devouring the stuff. Basically, you had to be pretty desperate if you were prepared to risk the immortal soul for a feed of steamed mussels.

You also had to get your mussels or oysters or barnacles from a validly ordained fishmonger within the orthodox Gaelic gastronomic tradition - not that easy if you lived for example outside Toomevara in the heart of landlocked Tipperary, or in Cloonfad, the Ballyhaunis suburb.

But things have changed since then and perhaps, as Joey Macaroon, a senior lecturer in Ecumenical Farming, has pointed out, "The time is ripe for a futile gesture."

The hardliners must learn to appreciate the heartfelt desire of families at Christmas, split between carnivores, vegetarians, fishophiles, turkey-haters, pastalovers, vegans and plain picky eaters, to sit down together around a meal symbolising faith and unity in an all-embracing ecumenicogastronomic experience, maybe with a decent bottle or wine or two, a glass of port with the pudding and a good cigar to finish.