I’m with Julie Bindel in fighting disgusting practices such as Female Genital Mutilation and in standing up to the trans mob, but I part company with her over the abortion debate in Ireland, about which she is so impatient.
I abandoned misogynistic and sex-obsessed Irish Roman Catholicism at the age of 16, and Dublin five years later, because I couldn’t bear living in a country dominated by a repressive church and a pernicious reverence for a tradition of political violence.
In schools, children were taught that the pope was infallible and the greatest man in Irish history was Patrick Pearse, frontman for a revolution in 1916 that was without any democratic or moral justification but which the Catholic church had blessed retrospectively. Questioning either shibboleth publicly was a fast track to career ruin, so criticism was confined to private whisperings and public hypocrisy.
So I emigrated to a country where debate was encouraged and I could speak my mind. But although I don’t believe in any god, nowadays I find myself frequently defending Ireland, north and south, and Christianity, against aggressive secularists who regard social progressivism as the new religion. On TV with the Guardian’s Dawn Foster, I found myself siding with the DUP, whom she dismissed as “backward” , a term I wager she would never use about non-whites and non-Christians – whom I believe have a perfect right to be social conservatives. Something has happened to debate in the UK and I regret having to abandon feminism since it was overtaken by ignorant, bigoted and intolerant social warriors.
When I grew out of being a practising anti-Catholic and opened my mind, I ceased thinking of the Republic of Ireland as simply having been oppressed by the church. It suited the state and society to shuffle off on to the clergy all the social problems it couldn’t export. At a time when there was no free secondary education, Christian Brothers taught the poor, nuns ran the hospitals and they took in the pregnant women whose families wanted them out of sight.
True, many of them were tunnel-visioned and some of them were cruel, but many more were selfless. And in Northern Ireland, although there were quite a few mad bigots on the fringes, it was Protestant ministers who played a vital role in persuading flocks bereaved and persecuted by the IRA that it was wrong for victims to take revenge and that they should be prepared to forgive the repentant.
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