The late Harold Wilson was credited with scoring the highest mark in some discipline at the University of Oxford since the late Cardinal Wolsey some four and a half centuries earlier. Like Wolsey he became his Monarch’s senior minister and a wily politician. I don’t recall whether Wolsey ever pronounced on Ireland. Wilson had many constituents of Irish descent in his Huyton constituency and attributed his expertise on Irish matters to that fact. (Edward Heath had an Irish housekeeper and nourished a similar conceit.)
Unlike that leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party, Wilson was not devoted to the Union and vaguely favoured a United Ireland. He believed that Nationalist Catholics were more straight-laced than Unionist Protestants who would embrace a Republican United Ireland if only Abortion were available in the Republic. Wilson had never spent five minutes study of Ireland.
The academically garlanded Denis Kennedy, when deputy editor or assistant Editor of The Irish Times declared in that paper in the 1980s that the proposed 8th Amendment of the Constitution, outlawing Abortion in the Republic, would prove an eternal barrier to Irish unity. Well, the South has not only formally Repealed the 8th Commandment but apparently Repealed the Ten Commandments without winning the hearts and minds of many Protestant Unionists.
Nobody could accuse the late Dr Garret FitzGerald of unfamiliarity with Irish history, culture and politics.But he appeared to
think that the loosening of puritanical restraints on divorce and access to contraception, for example, would have Unionists flocking to the Tricolour. That was a delusion. From the days of Cardinal Cullen, no friend of Irish nationalism of any stripe, the Catholic Hierarchy had a stifling grip on the faithful. It’s surprising they didn’t stamp out procreation with their preoccupation with devilment at dances, hemlines, mixed bathing, risque films and literature.But those who chain up the swings on Sundays were hardly the ones to emulate.
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