Rite and Reason: Archbishop Robin Eames is one of the most important leaders produced by the Church of Ireland. Senator Martin Mansergh reviews a new biography of the Primate of All Ireland.
Archbishop Robin Eames, as many testify, is one of the most important leaders that the Church of Ireland has produced, and is now senior primate in the worldwide Anglican communion. He has a political astuteness, rarely matched in recent decades in the Church of England, and was talked about for Canterbury.
His grandfather left Cork for Dublin during the Troubles. His father became a Methodist minister in Belfast and county grand chaplain of the Orange Order, and married the daughter of a unionist MP. One of Robin Eames's earliest memories is of the German air-raids in Belfast in 1941. He made Catholic friends in Queen's, commenting that "so much we have lived through could have been avoided if there had been real statesmanship on the Protestant side".
His father eventually joined the Church of Ireland ministry, to which Robin was ordained in 1963. His second parish was Dundela in east Belfast, the parish of origin of the children's writer and popular theologian, CS Lewis.
Before reaching the age of 40, he was appointed Bishop of Derry and Raphoe in 1975, before moving to Down and Dromore in 1980. In Raphoe he described the Troubles as "a challenge to the Christian heritage of this island", while speaking of "an Irish dimension to the future of Ulster".
One difficulty facing any religious minister is finding the right words in response to tragedy that might be comforting and reassuring. For him, leading had to go hand in hand with staying in touch with the community, not easy when, in his own words, "we have yet to convince a majority that realistic and visionary ecumenism has a real contribution to make to healing the wounds in Northern Ireland".
Appointed primate in 1986, Archbishop Eames was associated with the first steps towards peace. Without the approach by former taoiseach Albert Reynolds, his drafting, his diplomacy with John Major and James Molyneaux, there would have been no Downing Street Declaration and no early IRA ceasefire. Shortly afterwards, working with the Rev Roy Magee, Dr Eames helped bring about the loyalist ceasefire. In 1997 he hosted a private meeting in his house between Bertie Ahern, soon to be taoiseach, and Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble.
Drumcree was his cross, creating severe tensions several summers running. Critics saw him as insufficiently assertive, and the joint clerical mediation efforts, continuing till the security forces pushed through the march down the Garvaghy Road in 1996, put Cardinal Daly in an exposed position and damaged trust with the nationalist community.
A major priority was to prevent the crisis from splitting the Church of Ireland, which a more strident stand against sectarianism might have provoked.
Dr Eames is held in high regard within his church throughout Ireland. The paradox that members in the Republic feel more secure than those in Northern Ireland meant that his peerage on a personal basis was not an issue for most.
Ecclesiastically, Ireland has remained one country, despite partition, with capitals in Armagh and Dublin. Any attempt to relocate the central administration to Belfast, where the Gazette is located, would be seen in the South as in danger of giving the church, which straddles the Border well, a predominantly Northern and unionist character.
The Church of Ireland, unlike the Church of England, negotiated the issue of women priests admirably. Dr Eames has had to handle such tricky and divisive problems internationally as homosexual bishops, with the aim once again of trying to hold together the unity in diversity of the Anglican communion.
Archbishop Eames preaches excellent sermons, and Alf McCreary's book might contain more about his spiritual outlook. While not a critical biography, it supplies the material by which his contribution can be judged.
McCreary notes that, abroad, Dr Eames is an Irishman. Another paradox is that, while the Roman Catholic Church is much more uniformly associated with Irish nationalism, the Church of Ireland is a national, self-governing church, subject since 1870 to no external authority.
The author's own background is unionist. He uses terms like the Irish Republic and regards North and South as separate countries. Unionists do not like their chosen British identity to be questioned, but have complex attitudes to co-religionists in the South, sometimes reluctant to accept them as fully and willingly Irish.
This reviewer, born and educated in England, could not have been a public servant without Irish nationality and citizenship, derived by descent, from a paternal ancestry and home place in Ireland over 10 generations, something obviously overlooked by McCreary, when ascribing to me the identity of an "English adviser" to various Irish administrations.
Despite these minor criticisms, McCreary and his subject, Archbishop Eames, should be well pleased with this book, which can be read with profit by anyone interested in church and public affairs.
Senator Martin Mansergh has been adviser to three taoisigh on Northern Ireland affairs. Nobody's Fool - The Life of Archbishop Robin Eames, by Alf McCreary, is published by Hodder and Stoughton.