MOVES are now well afoot to award civic honours to worthy citizens. A small, allparty committee comprising chief whip Seamus Brennan, FG's Maurice Manning and Labour's Michael Ferris will meet soon to investigate. Before even such tricky questions of who is honoured, who will act as judges, what they will be called and what privileges an honour carries, the trio must decide whether it wants such a system at all. Ferris has put the matter down for discussion at the parliamentary Labour Party meeting next Wednesday. In the 1970s, he said, Tomas Mac Giolla of the Workers' Party vetoed the idea when all-party agreement was sought. "I am sure there will be mixed views in the party so I am anxious to get consensus before I discuss it with anyone else." The best rows are predicted on the subject of what the honoured should be called. We already have uasal (noble), introduced to counter the English esquire, and suggestions have included laoch (hero) and ridire (knight). Irish scholar Diarmaid Muirithe says all the above are laughable and so will be anything else the committee is likely to come up with, since it is not in our tradition to have honorary or honorific titles apart from Taoiseach and Tanaiste (chieftain).
The idea of honours here is as old as the 1960s, when Sean Lemass suggested it. The FG leader James Dillon turned it down as not fitting in with the idea of a republic and possibly open to political abuse. Plus ca change.