Disproportionate number of Catholics in Cabinet nothing short of a holy disgrace

NEWTON'S OPTIC:Jan O'Catholicname offers scant solace for forgotten Protestants

NORMAL SECTARIAN service has been resumed with the appointment of the Coalition’s Cabinet. The country is once again to be ruled by Catholic men and some women despite the clear role Catholic carelessness played in destroying the Irish economy.

A quick look at the figures reveals the structural prejudice involved. Five per cent of the State’s population is Protestant. With 30 Ministers including juniors, one minister should therefore by rights be Protestant while another should be half-Protestant, or “Church of Ireland” as half-Protestants are usually known.

Jan O’Sullivan, the junior Minister for Trade, is from a Church of Ireland background although this is not widely realised due to her unfortunate married name.

But that still leaves the Cabinet a whole Protestant short. Those of us of the reformed faith might have settled for Joan Burton because at least she looks Protestant, or at least she certainly did last week. But even that consolation has been denied us.

Frankly, Jan O’Catholicname is no great consolation either. She began her political career as a family planning activist and has now been given a minor role in small business policy, meaning she has been boxed into the stereotypical “Protestant” issues of contraception and shopkeeping. It is almost as if her Catholic colleagues think she should “get back behind the counter”.

Brian Hayes, junior Minister for Public Service Reform, occasionally mentions that his parents had a “mixed marriage”. Today, this means one partner is a man and the other is a woman but back in the 1920s it referred to a union of Protestant and Catholic.

Mr Hayes was subsequently raised a Catholic to avoid being thrown down a well but might he still count towards the Cabinet’s token total, perhaps as a half-hearted half-Protestant, or if his Dad was Church of Ireland, a half-quarter Protestant?

Alas, an offensive reference to his apparently embarrassing origins rules this out.

“My parents were quite brave,” he told a newspaper last year. “They had to get married at 6.30am, at the side altar.” Nobody with an ounce of Protestant character would mention such shame to anyone, let alone the nation.

Among the other junior ministers, John Perry has a solid English name and Willie Penrose has an Ulster-Scots ring to it but sadly both appear to have been Catholic from birth. The rest are simply papists.

Among the real Ministers the situation is even worse, with not even a half-Protestant among them.

Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn has described himself as an “existential atheist”, which his Opus Dei officials might think is the same thing.

Actual Protestants may beg to differ.

We can only look with envy at our Jewish compatriots, who make up 0.04 per cent of the State’s population. Thanks to Minister for Justice Alan Shatter they are 73 times over-represented at Cabinet level.

Thanks to Minister for Transport Leo Varadkar, the representation of half-Hindu Catholic-raised agnostics may be even more disproportionately generous.

Many people have said this is completely irrelevant as every adult has the vote and can express their own priorities. However, what legitimacy does this have when 87 per cent of adults are Catholic?

If we want equality in Ireland, everyone is just going to have to vote along religious lines. Then we can have a truly modern democracy.