One of the first things you notice in Ireland are the curtains.
Whether on a city street or a rural lane, there is hardly a front window in the country not frosted with lace.
The fragile fabric may owe its enduring popularity to its unique properties of charm and deception. A sweep of snowy lace in the window allows Irish homes to present a genteel respectability to the world outside while shielding the secrets within.
These curtains are a metaphor for what Dubliners call “the Irish way.”
When confronted with questions about the seemingly endless paradoxes that enmesh Irish life, Dubliners routinely explain it all away with a cryptic reference to “the Irish way.”
“The Irish way” explains why otherwise intelligent young women would rather risk pregnancy and disease than take a condom along on a date. It also lurks at the heart of why Catholic churches are packed every Sunday, but married couples are having babies at a lower rate than unmarried women.
And the spectacularly narrow margin–less than half of 1 percent–by which the nation voted to lift the ban on divorce and remarriage last week is a vivid illustration of “the Irish way” at work.
The Irish way is a somewhat slippery concept.
Sitting in her tiny office overlooking Dublin’s River Liffey, Ruth Riddick, the blunt-spoken education director of the Irish Family Planning Association, explains it this way: “We say one thing and do another, but we don’t see any hypocrisy in that. I think what we’re doing is creating ways in which to survive.”
This is how the Irish endured survive centuries of English oppression. It is how they continue to maneuver through the mine field of rules laid down by the Roman Catholic Church, to which about 92 percent of the country belongs.
Now, as last week’s referendum indicates, the Irish way is being used as a method to weather the traumatic changes buffeting a nation that is hurtling into the 21st Century after spending much of the last 100 years dawdling in the 19th.
When it came to the actual vote, many of the people who had expressed a strong wish to lift the divorce ban, in poll after poll, clearly were afraid to make such an official change.
Despite concerns over property division, child custody and the eternal nature of Catholic marriage, the reason the vote was so narrow may have more to do with the way the Irish see themselves.
In some ways, the divorce referendum was less about an issue than about fundamental identity.
This is no small matter in a country already struggling to fully accept itself as European rather than insular, as increasingly urban rather than rural and, most significantly, as secular rather than quasitheocratic.
For centuries, the church defined a major part of Ireland’s identity. With the vote to eliminate the ban on divorce, the Irish people have broken what arguably is the last major link in the once-strong chain binding Ireland and its laws to the will of the Catholic church.
That process has been accelerating since the 1970s, when Ireland eliminated its recognition of the “special position” of the Catholic church from its constitution.
Since then, the country has legalized contraception, which until 1985 was available only by prescription to married couples. In 1989, it passed the Judicial Separation and Family Law Reform Act, which permits couples legally to separate.
Moreover, the relentless sexual scandals that have wracked the Irish clergy in recent years have eroded its moral credibility in the eyes of many parishioners, particularly the young.
But it will take more than that, apparently, to sever the deep bond between the Irish people and their church. Even as many of them practice birth control, engage in premarital sex and walk away from failed marriages, 85 percent of the country still attends mass on Sunday.
Having watched Irish women grapple with the moral and religious aspects of defying the church’s ban on artificial birth control, Riddick has come up with a theory on how the Irish reconcile themselves with their church.
“The formal church exists in the public space as an authority, and it’s largely ignored,” she said.
“In private space, I think Irish people are profoundly committed to their faith as Roman Catholics. However, when it comes to personal needs that come into conflict with church authority, we do what we have to do.”
So, too, do the Irish clergy when it comes to family issues, said Rev. Mick Cullen, 47, a priest in a working-class parish in Dublin.
For all the railing from pulpits against contraception and about the need for married couples to stay together no matter the circumstances, he said, “There always was, even among the old parish priests, the idea that their confessional practice would be very different than their public utterances.”
It is another example of the Irish way. Everybody knew priests said in private might differ from what they told their congregations. But nobody talked about it.
“We’re very much a society that likes to shove things under the carpet,” Cullen said with an exasperated smile.
When the Irish Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Judicial Separation provision last July, Liz McManus, minister of state at the Department of the Environment, said, “As legislators, we have a duty to legislate for the world as we find it, not as we might wish to see it.”
For the Irish people, steeped in myth and legends, that is a difficult task.
