PERHAPS nobody personified political life more powerfully and more bizarrely than the outgoing Ceann Comhairle, Sean Treacy, who as a republican and a Labour Party TD for Tipperary could reasonably be expected (by an outsider to Irish politics anyway), to be a secular left wing libertarian.
But of course Labour in Ireland - the party of such ornaments to political life as Frank Cluskey and Jim Tully - has never stood for the cause of labour as is normally understood within Englishspeaking democracies; and what is called republicanism in Ireland is in fact a travesty of it.
We know about Sean Treacy's brand of republicanism. It has nothing to do with the intrinsic rights of the citizenry of the Republic; it is unrelated to the notion that the power of state derives from the consent to be governed by the people of the state; it is a stranger to the idea that the state should intrude on the private affairs of its citizens only with extreme reluctance and in special circumstances.
Sean Treacy's republicanism instead was of the Irish Catholic variety, which conferred upon the State the intrusive powers into the private lives of others which mainstream European republicanism specifically precludes. We know what Sean Treacy's republicanism refers to. He himself handsomely expressed the republicanism of which he was a representative during the IRA Border campaign, when he supported a motion that the Government "should give the republicans fighting the common enemy the full support of our army and police".
Patriotic pride
He himself said he felt pride that he had witnessed the upsurge of patriotism, and that, because of it, his generation would not pass away in shame.
Fortunately for the cause of civilisation on this island, the Government of the day did not send its troops and the Garda to help Sean South and his merry band in their forays across the Border. For which we should be grateful indeed.
But it was not the last time that Sean Treacy suggested armed intervention in the North. In 1971 admittedly, a time when the Northern Unionist government, aided and abetted by the Tories, had gone stark, staring mad - he said: "The time for compromise is over. We must come to the help of our long oppressed people quickly and effectively by all the means at our disposal. Are we to leave the minority to be shot down defenceless like dogs for fear of a unionist backlash? I do not advocate force, nor never have, but I advocate defence - a united defence against the designs, of Stormont and Westminster.
Army dependent on CJE.
Alas, the record does not elucidate what Sean Treacy's detailed proposals for united defence of the Northern minority should be - if there were any, though in all truth the Army then, which would have been dependent on buses from CIE, would have had extreme difficulty taking Lisbellaw post office, never mind defending Ardoyne.
To be fair to Sean Treacy, he was in fact expressing a despair, widespread at the time, that the governance of Northern Ireland had fallen into the hands of homicidal criminals who were as careless of the rule of law as were the terrorists attempting to overthrow their beloved Northern state.
But he did not limit his republican enthusiasm to sending the Army careering into UDR ambushes in Dromore and Dromara in 46A Leyland doubledeckers commandeered from the Dun Laoghaire run. He wired Brendan Corish with an injunction in dramatic telegrameese: "Dump O'Brien and O'Leary fast. Only hope of saving the party from national disgrace and political annihilation."
Not merely did he have strong feelings about the North - this republican socialist from republican Tipperary also had strong feelings about sexual morality and the role of the State in enforcing his opinions on such matters. Opposing liberalisation of what we coyly refer to as family planning - in other words, having sex without hearing the patter of little feet littering the place as a consequence - he told the Dail: Every fibre of my being tells me that it is wrong. The teaching of my Church tells me it is wrong. My family and friends tell me it is wrong . . . It is alien to all that we in this country as a Christian society stand for. It is affront to the youth of this nation. It attacks the Christian concept of marriage and undermines the family as the fundamental unit of society . . . If the Bill were passed it would do untold harm to the moral fabric of our people. It could be followed by more and more legislation of an anti Irish and anti Christian kind, leading ultimately to the emergence of a virtually pagan society.
Ethical alignment
In taking this stand, he was aligning himself with that great arbiter of all matters ethical, the Fianna Fail leader Charles Haughey, and opposing his own party leadership which, after all, was trying to moderate laws which included imprisonment for the unlawful sale or importation of a condom.
Now Sean Treacy might be a very nice man, and he has been a doughty Ceann Comhairle indeed, doing duties which would have worn down a less sturdy character than himself. But his ally of 1985, Charles Haughey, was no doubt suitably grateful last December when the Ceann Comhairle told the Dail as it was about to begin its debate on the Dunne affair: ".. .I would remind members that there is an onus on them to avoid, if at all possible, referring to persons outside this House in such a manner which could be construed as being prejudicial to any subsequent investigations that may be deemed necessary by appropriate authorities."
Now is the instruction from the parliamentary chair not to name allegedly guilty parties in an apparent financial scandal at the time the hallmark of a true republican, especially as parliament is often the only place where the truth might be tittered without fear of libel proceedings? To curtail freedom of speech - or for that matter to curtail freedom to avoid conception - might be in accordance with Solohead Beg republicanism; but it is most certainly not in accordance with the republicanism as it understood anywhere else.