Monday's Irish Times reported a conflict of views between Cardinal Cahal Daly and Bishop Joseph Duffy on the one hand and Alan Dukes on the other which will emerge in next Tuesday's Altered State programme on RTÉ 1. This disagreement relates to an occasion in early 1986 when Alan, as minister for justice, and myself met a delegation from the Catholic Hierarchy in relation to a proposed divorce referendum.
This matter was the subject of correspondence between Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiach and myself in 1990, which was published in the following year as an appendix to my autobiography, All In A Life. To my knowledge, no public reference has since been made to this matter - confirming a view I formed many years ago that, in Ireland, if you want to keep something secret, the best way to achieve this is to publish it somewhere.
In opening that meeting with the Catholic Hierarchy delegation I referred to my concern about the issue of bigamy arising from cases where a sacramental marriage was solemnised in Ireland by the Roman Catholic Church following a declaration of nullity by the authorities of that church in respect of an earlier joint civil/religious marriage.
The draft report of the meeting, prepared by a civil servant present, records a Catholic Hierarchy representative as follows: "It was additionally suggested that, in the case of a church remarriage following annulment by the Catholic marriage tribunals, consideration be given to a change in the civil law to provide that, where a sacramental marriage could not be a legal civil marriage because, under the civil law, a previous marriage still binds one of the parties, the sacramental marriage would not constitute a civil marriage."
I have to say that Alan Dukes and I reacted with shock to this proposal, for we felt that, in order to solve a specific Catholic Church problem, we were being asked to connive at undermining the protection of legal joint church/state marriages - a protection which, as legislators, we were bound to sustain under the existing terms of the Constitution.
In Cardinal Ó Fiach's letter to me in January 1990, arising from an article I had written in the journal Alpha, he quoted the above sentence from the draft record of our meeting and, after some qualifications concerning the record, he commented that "if the sentence is trying to say that the civil law should be altered to provide for some process whereby a church marriage could in some cases be designated as 'non-civil', that was not a proposal made by us".
But that, in fact, was the proposal that was made to us. Alan Dukes and I, and the civil servant who recorded the proceedings, were all clear about this - which is why Alan and I reacted so strongly as to have disrupted the flow of the meeting.
The cardinal's letter explained that, although "that was not a proposal made by us", the "preferable course of action in our view was the one we put forward, namely that the ceremony be conducted in such a way that it would not even have the appearance of a valid marriage under the existing civil law". It continued: "The possibilities which we had in mind ranged [ from] formal declaration at the time, or even as part of the ceremony, disclaiming any civil significance to the conducting of the ceremony in the absence of an episcopally-ordained minister, as provided by Canon 1112 (the delegation of a lay person to assist at marriage) or in Canon 1116 (marriage in the presence of witnesses alone)."
In my response to his letter, I pointed out to the cardinal that, as his delegation must presumably be aware from their study of the legal issues involved in bigamy, this crime may be committed even where the forms and ceremonies of marriage which have been gone through are for one reason or another void or invalid. Thus the Catholic Church's problem arising from its bigamous remarrying of certain people could not be resolved in any of these ways.
The truth is that all three of the hierarchy's more detailed proposals (which, in my recollection, were not made at the meeting, because of Alan's and my own very negative reaction to what had been said at the outset) would have involved the State abandoning the constitutional commitment to the protection of existing state/church marriages.
In my letter in reply I also went on to suggest that the emergence of a church process involving marriages without the presence of clergy might lead some to raise the question of why, if such marriages were, it would appear, permitted by the Catholic Church, civil ceremonies at which state registrars presided were regarded by it as not merely illicit for Catholics - which is clearly a legitimate position for the church to take - but as also being invalid. That is a curious relic of the time centuries ago when the only formal marriages were church marriages, there having then been no such thing as civil marriage.
The Catholic Church still does not recognise civil marriages and, accordingly, sometimes solemnises sacramental marriages involving a party who is still married in the eyes of the State, giving rise to a further conflict with the constitutional protection of such civil as well as religious marriages.
In my letter to Cardinal Ó Fiach I also raised the church's claim to have the power actually to dissolve - as distinct from annulling - marriages involving unbaptised persons, which, I suggested, could become a problem in the years ahead with the growth of the number of such people in our State.
Finally, I reminded Cardinal Ó Fiach that in other countries, e.g. neighbouring England and Wales, the church had avoided many of these difficulties by requiring those seeking annulments with a view to a further marriage (and also, I think, civilly-married people seeking a church marriage to another person) to seek a civil divorce first - a process that, in 1990, when this correspondence took place, was still not available here due to the failure of the first divorce referendum.
Now that this option is open, I have been surprised to be told officially that the Irish Catholic Church does not follow the practice elsewhere of requiring a civil divorce first in such cases in order to avoid involvement in bigamous marriages.
Cardinal Ó Fiach died two months after my letter to him. Had he lived, I am sure he would have written back to me, and we might have further clarified some of the confusion which arose out of that 1986 meeting.