Putting your cross in the Protestant Box
I hope and trust that all our readers, and certainly all our
Prayer Crusaders, are ‘values voters’ or, rather, in most cases non-voters as
there are so few candidates about for whom any Christian could vote in good
conscience. This time around UK, Irish
and Commonwealth voters might be eligible to cast a ballot in local elections
or for the Northern Ireland Assembly depending on where you have registered to
vote.
It is
impossible to say anything about parties at the local elections as councillors
are apt to be a law unto themselves.
Individual candidates have to be quizzed carefully as to their
intentions with particular attention to such matters as whether they would wish
to exercise licensing and planning powers to prevent the opening of new
abortuaries and places of immoral entertainment, whether they are committed to
the freedom to protest against existing establishments of those kinds and also
against socially and morally damaging educational programmes, and whether they
themselves would seek to prevent the introduction of such programmes where
local authorities retain the ability to do so, whether they are committed to
the rights of parents with respect to the manner in which their children are
educated, and whether they will exclude men from female-use amenities and
services irrespective of the socially constructed gender they claim as their
own.
Stormont,
however, is a different matter in that it is possible to recommend a party for
your consideration although it is not one that springs immediately to mind for
Catholic voters. All the parties are
committed to the far left consensus as to the scope of state action and the
approximate level of public spending.
The differences, therefore, come down to moral and cultural issues as
well as the constitutional
question. For the values voter the moral
issues must come first every time, and only one party of government offers a
safe and consistent stance on all the subjects we hold most dear, and that
party is the DUP, Dr. Paisley’s party.
As I said, not, perhaps, the ‘go to’ vote for a Catholic, but why ever
not? Stormont will not discuss dogmatic
theology, and Westminster has not done so for a very long time indeed; the only
theology ever debated in either forum is moral theology on which the
evangelical Protestant is at one with us on almost all issues, the exception
being divorce and remarriage on which some of them anomalously depart from the
literal meaning of the biblical text for no better reason than that some of the
early so-called ‘reformers’ from whom their sects derive their doctrines chose
to do so either for political considerations or from personal weakness. The DUP is reasonably reliable on divorce,
and candidates can be persuaded to harden their opposition to no fault divorce
at will and the reduction of the marital bond to a secular contract. They are wholly reliable in opposing abortion
both as it is legally defined and in the form of providing abortifacients
described, wrongly, as contraceptives; and they have consistently opposed the
promotion of homosexual practices and the related phenomenon of transgenderism
since Dr. Paisley’s own Save Ulster from Sodomy campaign (on which our bishops
should have given him far more support than they did). Neither of the major parties associated with
the Catholic community offers a policy programme consonant with Catholicism,
indeed SF can now be relied upon to oppose Catholic moral teaching on almost
all points. As for the SDLP, while it is
only fair to acknowledge that many of its candidates (but by no means all) are
opposed to abortion, the party subscribes to the ‘gay rights’ agenda and to the
enforcement of ‘equalities education’ derived from it; many candidates also
support transgenderism.
The
remaining cultural and constitutional questions might give pause for thought
before voting DUP, but there is reason to think that the DUP would become more
flexible on Irish and Catholic culture if it were in their electoral interests
to do so. As for the constitutional
question, who wants to re-enter the Godless EU or to join the post-Catholic
Republic? The EU has given ample
demonstration through its manipulation of trading arrangements and threats to
close the border that it has little interest in the interests of Northern
Ireland; it is also beginning to show a marked lack of sympathy towards the
Republic. Neither the Republic’s nor the
British government has any sympathy with
the aspiration of the people of Ulster to maintain natural law-based provisions
of the common law on life issues but the devolutionary UK offers better
prospects than the unitary Republic.
Culturally,
while the DUP will, I am sure, continue to oppose celebration of the Republican
struggle, it may be induced to accept such public manifestations of our faith
as Corpus Christi processions, rosary walks and the erection of statues. The biggest point of disagreement has not
been over a religious question at all, but over the Irish language to which
many Protestants object as they fail to appreciate that, far from being some
sort of import into the North, the Gaelic language is the common heritage of
the Dal-riada from which their people originate as much as do our own. That confusion is, of course, shared by many
Catholics and is compounded by the manner in which Gaelic is spelled and taught
in Ulster. The misunderstanding is, unfortunately,
incorporated into the Good Friday Agreement’s treatment of the subject as
well.
The truth of
the matter is that the six counties contain few areas in which Irish was still
the principal spoken language at any point in the twentieth century; the
language has, rather, been chosen as a medium for education by families, and
learnt by adults, who have in most cases a political aspiration to see a united
Ireland (the exceptions are generally Protestants like the late Paul Hamill,
with a deep commitment to community harmony and cultural unity within Northern
Ireland). It is taught very much as a
foreign language using the Free State spellings rationalised in the twenties
and thirties, and the vocabulary and syntax favoured by the Southern
establishment, which is to say the Kerry dialect. Although both Gaeltacht areas lie within the
Republic its educational authorities dislike Donegal dialect words still used
by older people (most of whom remember many more having been in regular use by
their grandparents whose rhythm of speech was also, somehow, subtly different),
and wish to stamp out any tendency to revert to traditional spellings that
might linger on. The English authorities
now require children to be taught a formal written language but no longer
desire that children, as the old joke has it, ‘talk proper’ instead of retaining
dialect speech; and the Welsh are free to use Northern or Southern spellings
and vocabulary as they please. The
weaponisation of Gaelic is most undesirable.
The Good Friday Agreement suggests that the language would be best
fostered by an extension of the Teilifís na Gaeilige service across the six UK
counties, but I would strongly suggest that an extension of the remit,
workforce and broadcasting capabilities of the Alba service to serve the
requirements of all nine counties as well as the current audience in Scotland
and its islands would provide better results both practically and in terms of
cross-community relations and a broader acceptance and actual use of the Gaelic
language. Having learned the traditional
spellings used in the island Gaidhealteachd, children and adult learners might
take an additional short paper on Free State spellings and the vocabulary
variants of the South. The linguistic
standard which should apply to Ulster is that found in the surveys of, and
publications on Ulster of the (nationalist) Gaelic League in the latter part of
the nineteenth century before partition, rationalised spelling or standardised
Irish had been devised. As our report on
the future of British broadcasting recommended, the programmes on offer should
address the interests of listeners and viewers in Northern Ireland.
It is also
worth remembering that, as a Catholic voter, the DUP will pay far closer
attention to your needs and your opinions than any party would to somebody who
had not crossed community lines to lend them their support. Ultimately, values voters can only succeed by
coming together in the sort of broad movement that has achieved so much in
America.
By Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard.
