My Eyes Are Smiling, Too

Over the last three years, there has been a four-fold increase in the number of people joining the British Armed Forces from the Irish Republic. The only reason why there aren't even more is revulsion at the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

(Incidentally, if the war in Afghanistan is because of an attack on New York, then why aren't the Irish Republic's own Armed Forces fighting it? This has nothing to do with neutrality: any number of Irish citizens must have died on 9/11.)

The Irish Republic is growing up, and duly adopting a more mature attitude both to her neighbour and to her own history, an attitude which should include accession to the Commonwealth without delay.

After all, it was the Pope who gave the Kings of England the Lordship of Ireland in the first place, and a Papal Blessing was sent to William III when he set out for Ireland. The Lateran Palace was illuminated for a fortnight when news of the Battle of the Boyne reached Rome.

Into the nineteenth century, Catholics joined in the annual celebrations of the Relief of Derry; into the late eighteenth, Catholic priests even took part in the prayer service at the Walls of Derry.

The professors and seminarians of Maynooth published a declaration of loyalty to the King during the 1798 Rebellion, and those extremely few priests who had adhered to that Rebellion were excommunicated, the bishops calling them "the very faeces of the Church".

Prominent Belfast Catholic laymen chaired rallies against successive Home Rule Bills, with prominent Catholic priests on the platforms. There were numerous Catholic pulpit denunciations of Fenianism, which is unlike any of the three principal British political traditions in being a product of the French Revolution. Hence its tricolour flag. And hence its strong anti-clerical streak, always identifying Catholicism as one of Ireland's two biggest problems.

Jean Bodin's theory of princely absolutism, held by the Stuarts and by their anti-Papal Bourbon cousins, was incompatible with the building up of the Social Reign of Christ, subsequently the inspiration for all three great British political movements. Likewise, ethnically exclusive nation-states deriving uncritically from the French Revolution do not provide adequate means to that end.

By contrast, the absence of any significant Marxist influence in this country has been due to the universal and comprehensive Welfare State, and the strong statutory (and other, including trade union) protection of workers and consumers, the former paid for by progressive taxation, and all underwritten by full employment: very largely the fruits of Catholic Social Teaching, especially via Diaspora Irish participation in the Labour Movement here as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

And such fruits have been of disproportionate benefit to ethnically Gaelic-Irish Catholics throughout the United Kingdom; even in the 1940s, Sinn Féin worried that they were eroding its support.

All very well worth fighting for (if only it were in fact what the British Armed Forces were currently fighting for, of course).

As more and more people in the Irish Republic clearly agree.