Ireland = Naboth, EU Establishment = Ahab?

While listening to the first reading at Mass this morning (NAB version, JB version) I found myself thinking about last Thursday’s referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in the Irish Republic. Those who voted rejected it clearly. Yet the three million or so voters of the Republic of Ireland, less than one percent of those in the EU, were the only ones asked to vote.

Though I really don’t know which way I would have voted – Irish citizens overseas don’t have a vote – I found myself comparing Naboth with Ireland and the establishment of the EU with Ahab. ‘I will not give you my ancestral heritage’, said Naboth to King Ahab. Many Irish voters thought in the same way. Whether the Treaty would involve taking that heritage isn’t fully clear to me. ‘Ahab went home disturbed and angry at the answer’. It seems that some of the EU establishment have similar feelings, though, unlike Ahab and his wife Jezebel with Naboth, they’ve no plans to kill Irish prime minister Brian Cowen or any of the country’s citizens.

The ‘No’ campaigners included pro-life people who were afraid that the Lisbon Treaty would force pro-abortion legislation on the Irish Republic. (Last week the Democratic Unionist Party, that of Dr Ian Paisley, were able to get a guarantee from Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, that the pro-abortion legislation in Britain would not be forced on Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK but has been exempted until now from those laws. Mr Brown needed the nine votes of the DUP in Westminster to pass controversial legislation that allows the police to detain suspects for up to 42 days. To their credit, the DUP got something worthwhile from their horse-trading).

There’s no doubt that the prevailing viewpoint in EU countries is in favour of legalized abortion. Pressure is being brought on Ireland, Malta and Poland to change their laws. Poland has very restrictive abortion laws – though any taking of the life of an unborn child for whatever reason is intrinsically evil - while abortion is illegal in the other two. I’m not sure that a ‘Yes’ vote would have made any great difference.

However, it was understood that if any country rejected the Lisbon Treaty that would be the end of it. But it seems that President Sarkozy of France and some others don’t see it that way. They are already talking of a second referendum so that the Irish people will say ‘Yes’. But that could backfire and it’s reminiscent of the late Ferdinand Marcos’s way of changing the Philippine Constitution after declaring Martial law in 1973. The people were assembled throughout the country and asked to raise their hands in favour of ‘Yes’. The question was repeated in each assembly until enough raised their hands. However, such a crude approach wouldn’t work in Ireland.

So maybe the story of Naboth and Ahab is particularly relevant in Europe today.

Which side in Ireland took Pope Benedict’s 'hint' – if any – in the Lisbon Treaty referendum?

Some were speculating – see my post yesterday - that Pope Benedict’s talk last Wednesday on St Columban, in which he described the saint as ‘one of the fathers of Europe’, was a hint to the voters in the Irish Republic to vote the following day in favour of the Lisbon Treaty, which has to be approved by each of the 27 members-states of the European Union to come into effect. Ireland was the only country where the matter was put to the people, as such a treaty involves an amendment of its Constitution.

Polls before the referendum held last Thursday all indicated a result too close to call. The pundits predicted that if the turnout of voters wasn’t much higher than 40 percent the ‘Yes’ side would win. The higher the turnout, they said, the greater the chance for the ‘No’ side to win.

As it happened, 53.13% of those eligible to do so voted, a high turnout for a referendum. Of those, 46.5% voted for ‘Yes’ and 53.4% for ‘No.’ So the pundits were right. But the ‘knife-edge’ turned out to be a blunt instrument leaving many leading Irish politicians reeling.

The main government party, Fianna Fáil, and the two main opposition parties, Fine Gael and Labour, urged their supporters to vote yes. Last week, for the first time ever, the leaders of those three parties held a joint press conference in which they spoke of the importance, as they saw it, of the people voting for ‘Yes’. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the two largest parties in the Irish Republic, trace their origins to the Irish Civil War (1922-23) and have never been in government together.

I’m doubtful that Pope Benedict was using St Columban to give a gentle hint to the Irish voters. Yes, the saint is in a very real sense ‘one of the fathers or Europe’ – the Christian Europe that the proposed but rejected European Constitution refused to acknowledge. The Lisbon Treaty is that same proposed constitution under a different name, according to many.

But while St Columban was ‘a father of Europe’ he wrote a number of letters to different popes asking that he and his monks follow the Irish calendar for Easter rather than the Roman one. In other words, while absolutely loyal to the teachings of the Church and to the pope, he was prepared to fight for this. Indeed, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the reaction of some of those popes on receiving a letter from St Columban wasn’t ‘Not him again!’ Here are Pope Benedict’s word about this aspect of the saint’s life:

An occasion to manifest their opposition (bishops who opposed Columban’s introduction of private and repeated confession and penances) was the dispute about the date of Easter. Ireland, in fact, followed the Eastern tradition as opposed to the Roman. The Irish monk was called in 603 to Chalon-sur-Saon to render account before a synod of his practices related to penance and Easter. Instead of appearing at the synod, he sent a letter in which he minimized the issue inviting the synodal fathers to discuss not only the problem of the date of Easter, a small problem according to him, ‘but also of all the necessary canonical normatives that are disregarded - something more grave - by many’ (cfr. Epistula II,1). At the same time, he wrote to Pope Boniface IV - as some years earlier he had turned to Pope Gregory the Great (cfr. Epistula I) - to defend the Irish tradition (cfr. Epistula III).

So those on the ‘No’ side could equally speculate that Pope Benedict was encouraging them rather than the ‘Yes’ supporters by speaking about St Columban.

The full results of the referendum, and of all previous referenda in Ireland, are here.

Did the Pope invoke St Columban in favour of the Lisbon Treaty?

In my blog yesterday I wrote: I don’t know if Pope Benedict timed his talk yesterday deliberately for the eve of the referendum today in the Republic of Ireland on the Lisbon Treaty, the only one of the 27 states in the European Union to have such a vote. Polls indicate that the vote could go either way.

In a report in today's Daily Telegraph Tom Peterkin seems to think that he did: Even the Pope intervened to urge backing for further EU integration, describing Irish missionary St Columbanus as 'one of the fathers of Europe.'

Pope Benedict is not the first to speak of St Columban in such terms.

Before the last Irish referendum on abortion in March 2002 the Vatican sent out signals that the wording of the proposed referendum was acceptable to Catholics. The Irish bishops urged people to vote 'Yes'. But one small pro-life lobby thought the wording didn't go far enough and asked people to vote 'No'. It is thought by many that their 'no' votes brought about the defeat of the government's proposal. As a result, abortion is, in theory though not in practice, unrestricted in the Republic of Ireland. 42.89 of those eligible actually voted. of those, 50.42 percent voted 'no' while 49.58 percent voted 'yes' In other words, 10,500 votes made the crucial difference.

Votes are being counted in Ireland as I write this. The turnout was probably around the same as that for the abortion referendum and the final result could be as close - going either way.

I really don't know which result will be better for Ireland and for the rest of the European Union. The Irish Republic is the only one of the 27 member-states to have a referendum, for constitutional reasons.

And I really don't know if Pope Benedict deliberately gave is talk on St Columban to give a hint to the Irish electorate to vote 'yes'. Even if he did, they didn't have to take the hint. We'll know later if they did.

One of the delightful quirks of elections and referenda in Ireland is that after the polling stations close, everyone goes home and has a good night's sleep before counting starts at 9 the following morning.