A fundamental shift in our culture, about which I have seen little or no serious discussion, has been that from judgmental to non-judgmental attitudes, especially to lifestyles. Only a generation ago we were unusually censorious - or we lived comfortably with censorious attitudes to departures from societal norms.
Extremes beget counter-extremes. Now there is an equally strong convention against expressing any view that could be considered to be "judgmental". Charity and tolerance - rare qualities in much of our past - are now esteemed to be paramount virtues.
But this new and welcome shift in social attitudes has its own potential dangers if it precludes public discussion of matters affecting our society's well-being.
With the collapse of the Roman Catholic Church's moral authority, an urgent need has emerged for a civic morality to ensure conditions favourable to the future good health of our social system. But "non-judgmentalism" has become such an obsession with opinion-formers that raising this issue invites a hostile reaction.
It is sometimes suggested that the church's loss of moral authority in Ireland has been due to the exposure of paedophilia amongst its priests and brothers in recent years. Certainly its impact on public opinion has been huge and its extent greatly magnified by the effect of past cover-ups - themselves a source of immense scandal - which have led to 40 years of such practices being exposed and processed through our courts.
What has done the most damage is that some people in authority in the church unforgivably put the non-exposure of clerical abusers before the protection of children - a matter the laity passionately, and rightly I believe, thought should have had absolute priority.
But the erosion of the Catholic Church's moral authority antedated by a quarter-of-a-century the emergence of these events into public view. The genesis of this erosion was the publication of Humanae Vitae in July 1968, after 35 years of positive church support for an alternative contraceptive method designated as "natural family planning".
Paul VI's insights into the impact of contraception on sexual behaviour were accurate, but for the great bulk of the laity two elements of the condemnation of "artificial" contraception were non-credible. First, elevating the distinction between different forms of contraception into an immutable theological principle made no sense to people either inside or outside the church. And, second, while the biblical exhortation to "increase and multiply" had made good sense in past millennia, it was a perverse message to convey to a now potentially overcrowded globe.
By requiring its bishops and clergy to promulgate this message, the Catholic Church fatally undermined its own moral authority - and as so many clergy and bishops patently did not believe this message themselves, they appeared hypocritical as well as foolish.
For many decades the church was all too successful in blocking social change, acting like a dam behind which a huge pressure built up as streams of ideas from the world outside percolated through to us. When Humanae Vitae effectively punched a hole in this dam, it soon gave way.
And so the stream of modern ideas, that had trickled into the world outside Ireland over many decades, came to us here as a flash flood. And in a decade or two they transformed the mores of a new generation. One example of this is the almost twenty-fold increase in the proportion of births that are non-marital, to a level that within the EU outside Scandinavia, is exceeded only by France and Britain. No less than 45 per cent of first pregnancies are now non-marital.
The moral void is difficult to fill in the face of politically correct non-judgmentalism.
All this has influenced attitudes towards marriage. It has almost obscured the fact that for quite fundamental biological reasons, marriage is an almost universal social institution. The prolonged nurturing period that is peculiar to human infants has generally required sustained physical support by two parents, and over many thousands of generations this has in turn created a psychological as well as physical infant dependence on two-parent care.
THE relationship between parents that evolved to meet this need is what we call marriage. The Jewish and Christian religions did not invent marriage: they simply recognised this widespread social need and built it into their moral codes.
In Ireland, however, the State allowed the churches an almost exclusive role in marriage. Until very recently only a handful of civil marriages were contracted - and accorded little public esteem. The State has always recognised religious marriages for civil law purposes, originally at common law and later by statute, and since 1864 has registered them.
In the public mind, marriage thus came to be seen primarily, perhaps even exclusively, as a religious rather than a civil matter. And with the rapid decline in the moral authority of the Catholic Church and the diminution in acceptance of church teaching on marriage, the absence of any widespread sense of the underlying biological rationale for it and the State's historically limited role in it have led to marriage being devalued in the Irish public mind to a socially dangerous degree.
Even at school, while I recognised the wisdom of church teaching that couples marry each other, the church's role being limited to witnessing and blessing such joint public declarations, I was disturbed by the dangerous illogicality of some of its canon law provisions that had evolved to meet special situations - the so-called Pauline and Petrine privileges - and the related church claim to have the right to dissolve certain marriages. With my own children I preferred to base the rationale of marriage on what seemed to me to be less equivocal, non-religious grounds.
My discussions with the Catholic Hierarchy before the 1986 divorce referendum confirmed me in this view, when Alan Dukes and I were faced with a proposal that we should simply ignore, rather than amend, the constitutional protection of marriage. This was to facilitate the bigamous remarriage by the church of people whose first marriage had been annulled by it, but not by the State.
In initiating the 1986 divorce referendum I was moved by a growing concern at what seemed to be the destabilising effect on our society of the proliferation of unrecognised second unions following marriage breakdowns. I felt that unless we tackled this, new generations would be encouraged to bypass marriage.
Such a trend was already becoming evident in the mid-1980s, and it may well be that even if divorce had been introduced earlier, the trend away from marriage, as well as its postponement until an advanced stage of a relationship would have developed at much the same pace.
What I found fascinating - and most disturbing - was that during that referendum, no one on either side, was prepared to discuss that issue. The entire discussion then, and again in 1995, was fought out as a kind of dialogue of the deaf, carried on between, on the one side, the theological and ideological conservatives with their "floodgates" argument, (which the rate of divorce since then has not appeared to validate), and the ideological liberals, pressing what seemed to me to be their inherently illogical and intrinsically unconvincing argument that there exists some kind of civil right to dissolve a contract that has been entered into on the basis of indissolubility.
It needs to be asserted that the State's role in society not merely permits but requires it to foster marriage. For, despite the growth of marriage breakdown, marital relationships offer by far the most secure basis for the successful upbringing of children. Just how the State could best fulfil such a role is a matter to which our public authorities could usefully devote some attention.