Wrapping Up Relics

Right, so I was saying yesterday that although people tend to think of the veneration of relics as a peculiarly -- even a grotesquely -- Catholic thing, in many ways it's just a popular manifestation of normal human behaviour. Loads of us keep photos of loved ones, treasure keepsakes from special places, visit museums and exhibitions, and lay flowers at graves. There's hardly anyone among us who isn't appalled when graves are desecrated or when war memorials are treated as urinals. We don't think of graves as mere patches of ground, of gravestones and monuments as lumps of carved rock; of wreaths as dead plants or mass-produced paper decorations: these things matter to us, for reasons that go beyond sentiment, though we may find it hard to articulate what those reasons are.

In historical Christianity, as George Weigel keeps saying, 'stuff matters'. The baptismal water actually counts. The holy oils used at baptism, in confirmation, in ordination, and in extreme unction all count. At communion, the bread and the wine really mean something. Ashes, blessed fire, holy water, baptismal salt, incense, candles, palm leaves, flowers, vestments, food -- they all mean something. But what? And how? What does the Church mean when it says that there is scarcely any proper use of material things which cannot be directed toward the sanctification of men and the praise of God?

One of my favourite statues is a piece just off Trafalgar Square, in the porch of the Anglican church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Called 'In the Beginning', it's by Mike Chapman, and is a big squared off block on the top of which is carved a newborn baby, with unbilical cord still attached, and around which are the words, taken from the first and fourteenth verses of the first chapter of St John's gospel, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh and lived among us.'

The Catholic Church makes a point of not ripping Biblical passages out of context and resting whole arguments on individual 'proof passages', but I don't think it's going too far to say that this first part of John's first chapter is absolutely central to Catholic theology. John uses the word sarx - flesh - thirteen times in his gospel, and every time he does so he does so in a brutally physical sense. He goes out of his way to show that flesh and spirit are utterly distinct, but he doesn't do this in a Neo-Platonist or Manichean sense; for John flesh may be distinct from spirit, but even so, the Word became flesh! God, who is pure spirit, did not merely veil himself in flesh, as in the popular carol, but he became flesh, and by doing so he sanctified the material world, a world he had already created and recognised as good.*

This incarnational and sacramental understanding of the material world underpins the whole theology of relics, and has done so -- albeit not in a carefully worked out way -- from the time of Our Lord himself. Think of the story of the woman who thought to herself 'If I only touch his garment, I shall be made well,' and who reached out from behind Jesus and touched the fringe of his garment and was healed (Matt. 9.20-22). Her humility alone is striking, as she deliberately doesn't approach Jesus, instead tentatively stretching out merely to touch something he had touched, but even putting aside her indirect approach which Jesus fully validates by saying that her faith has healed her, it's worth asking why she thought this would make a difference. Why did she think that she could be healed simply by touching a thing?

Well, this sacramental understanding of the world had long been a part of Judaism. Look at the stories of Elijah and Elisha. I'm not sure whether we should regard the story of the waters being parted after being struck by the cloak of Elijah (2 Kings 2.8, 13-14) as an example of this, but given how the mechanics of this appear to contrast with Moses' more famous parting of the Red Sea (Exodus 14.21-29), it may well be so. Perhaps more instructive is the tale of the bones of Elisha:

'So Elisha died, and they buried him. Now bands of Moabites used to invade the land in the spring of the year. And as a man was being buried, lo, a marauding band was seen and the man was cast into the grave of Elisha; and as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood on his feet.' (2 Kings 13.20-21)

I don't think it does any good to talk here of a measure of the Holy Spirit having stayed with the decaying corpse of the prophet in such a way that a fresh corpse could be revived on contact with Elisha's bones; I'd be very much inclined to doubt that Divine power is a finite resource, or that it gradually fades away, like Carbon-14. I think we simply have to talk here of God choosing to act through physical matter, that matter being the bones -- the physical remains -- of one of his most devoted servants.

The belief that God could -- and did -- act through physical things associated with the most distinguished of his servants was clearly common in the early Church. Think of how, in the months after Pentecost, believers 'even carried out their sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and pallets, that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them,' and how years later, when Paul was at Corinth, 'God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them' (Acts 5.15, 9.11-12).

The last pagan emperor of Rome, Julian the Apostate, in a notorious anti-Christian diatribe, Against the Galileans, seems to indicate that the two apostles' tombs were being venerated even during the time of the apostle John: he says that John only explicitly identified Jesus as God, something the earlier evangelists had refrained from doing, after he had heard that the tombs of Peter and Paul were being worshipped. Indeed, he regarded the tendency of contemporary Christians to 'grovel among tombs and pay them honour' as one of the more ridiculous Christian practices.

It's worth taking a look at the Martyrdom of Polycarp, an account of the execution of the second-century bishop of Smyrna in modern Turkey. St Polycarp, of whom St Irenaeus of Lyons was a disciple, had himself been a disciple of St John, and thus a younger contemporary of St Clement of Rome and St Ignatius of Antioch. He was burned at the stake for refusing to burn incense in honour of the Roman Emperor, and afterwards the Christians of Smyrna gathered up his bones which they treasured and used to call to mind his heroic example:

'And so we afterwards took up his bones which are more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold, and laid them in a suitable place, where the Lord will permit us to gather ourselves together, as we are able, in gladness and joy, and to celebrate the birth-day of his martyrdom for the commemoration of those that have already fought in the contest, and for the training and preparation of those that shall do so hereafter.' (Martyrdom of Polycarp, 18.2-3)

Relics, then, and the veneration of them, have been a feature of Christianity from earliest times, long before the Bible was definitively shaped into the form we currently have it. There's no denying that at times this practice got out of hand, and was abused, but while it may occasionally have veered towards idolatry, far more often it is best viewed simply as instances of ordinary people, believing absolutely in Jesus but too humble to approach him directly, reaching out to touch those who he himself had touched.

In case you're wondering, no, I didn't go to see the relics of St Thérèse, whether in Liverpool, in Salford, or in Manchester. I'm afraid I've been stuck here trying to work.

I missed them in Ireland a few years ago too. I think I was in Greece at the time. Mind, I often wonder how many people in Ireland did go to see them. Lots, surely, but hardly the three million I keep reading in the press nowadays. Three quarters of the population? Really? And yet I've never heard anyone once mention having gone to see them. I know we can be oddly quiet about things, but that quiet? I'm pretty sure that loads of people went to see the relics more than once, and that the count was a tad on the high side at every venue and at every mass, with people who'd queued to see the relics getting counted afresh if there were masses there too. It wouldn't take much to massively inflate the numbers.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that huge numbers of Irish people didn't go to see the relics last time out, just that I very much doubt that the numbers were quite so huge as are being made out. Mind, I'm an ancient military historian -- I always think big numbers are inflated, and I'm always suspicious of big multiples of three.

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* Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons I'm very fond of the sentiment expressed, however scornfully, in the Monty Python song 'All Things Dull and Ugly'. He didn't just make the things that are bright and beautiful; he made everything, including a huge amount of ugly things, and he never made anything to last.

Haunted by the Reformation

Well, the European qualifiers for next year's World Cup are over, and I doubt there are many people out there who would have predicted at the start of this campaign that when the qualifiers came to an end, only five of the 53 countries would remain unbeaten, those five being Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and, um, Ireland. Of course, this doesn't give us a huge amount to crow about: of the eight second-place teams that go through to the play-offs, Ireland earned the fewest points over the campaign. Still, fingers crossed for the next match...


So yes, yesterday I was talking about the visit of the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux to England and Wales, and about how one Sophia Deboick, writing in The Guardian, seems to think it remarkable that the Catholic Church should use a saint to promote Catholicism. I know, astonishing, eh? In this day and age...

Anyway, the gist of the article is as follows: when Thérèse died in 1897, her sisters set about moulding her image and building a cult around her, and were supported in this by Rome, where Thérèse was seen as a useful modern example of meek female purity. She was canonised in 1925, and in the 1960s was presented as a great theologian and as a proto-feminist. Nowadays, when the Church supposedly regards virginity and motherhood as the only acceptable female conditions, she is a perfect example of the former, while her mother, whose cult is growing, stands as a useful example of the latter.

I'd like to have seen a lot more of this, because as it stands it's just a handful of sweeping statements, hardly substantiated at all. The stuff about her autobiograph having been creatively edited by her sisters is fascinating, and I'd like to learn more about that. The idea that photos of her were suppressed in favour of sentimentalised paintings is almost as interesting, but it rather clashes with what I've read elsewhere about how much of her early popularity was due to the novelty of a saint - and long before canonisation we was widely regarded as a saint - having been photographed. Claims about virginity and motherhood being the only acceptable female conditions in the eyes of the Church are utter bunkum, as I said yesterday, and indeed I don't think I've ever heard Thérèse being singled out as a virgin: as a thinker, yes, as a saint, certainly, as someone who struggled on a daily basis to live for Christ, absolutely,but as a virgin? No. It's always kind of gone without saying, as a rule, her having been a nun. It was never something to specifically focus on. Until reading Ms Deboick's article, I'd never heard of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the Holy Virgin, though I'd heard time and again of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower.

Still, the comments on the article are well worth a read, not least for how they gxpress a discomfort with this kind of stuff. I don't mean the usual tribalism of most of my fellow Guardian readers - or at least most of those who leave comments - which tends to manifest itself as a kind of unthinking pack atheism; I'm talking about a straightforward unease, of the kind that Basil Hume was so concerned about in 1997, when the idea was first proposed that the relics should be brought to England. He felt the time wasn't yet right, as the old English view of Catholicism as superstitious, idolatrous, and 'other' was still too powerful.

Taking some of the comments, and stitching them together, you get the following:

'I do find the whole spectacle rather gruesome. I thought the dead were supposed to be allowed to rest in peace not go on world tours... All seems rather medieval and macabre. Can't they just let Thérèse rest in peace... I love Ellis Peters' Cadfael books. I just never thought that people would take them so seriously and decide to promenade St Winifried's - sorry, that should be St Therese's - bones all over the place in such a bizarre Dark Ages fashion... Cardinal Hume, an intellectual giant compared to his infantile British successors, refused to allow what he saw as a display of superstitious idolatry... I have to say that I just do not get this relics thing... This Dead People's Bones Worship Cult thing seems to me to bear no resemblance to the Christianity described in the Bible or practiced by other mainstream faiths... Can anybody explain to me why these pitiful tubercular bones are being hawked round the country rather than been given a decent Christian burial. It couldn't be a cynical ploy to make loads of dosh for the Catholic church could it? I thought we had a reformation in this country... Anyone starting today to dig up the body of a dead person, cut it up and cart it round for other weirdos to goggle at would have a net thrown over them and be invited to some heavyweight counselling... It is really hard to understand the hold that a few bones from, at the time of her death, an unknown Carmelite nun can still have over so many people (I guess more women that men, which is rather strange in itself) And they all have the vote!

There's standard anti-Christian stuff as well, of course, but this is more specific. It is, in effect, Calvin's anti-Catholic legacy in its current incarnation, a strand in modern English anti-religious thinking which tends not merely to identify religion in general as a mental disorder, but to pick out Catholicism as a particularly pernicious and sinister variety of such, drawing on all the old clichés and myths to do so.


Relics, I think it has to be said, are probably one of the things about Catholicism that most non-Catholics are uncomfortable with. Even when they're not dismissed as fakes they're seen as weird, grotesque, superstitious, idolatrous, and even pagan. What's more, they even leave a lot of Catholics cold, or at any rate engender mixed feelings. One of the more considered and informative comments on the Deboick article is from a fellow who identifies himself as 'a Catholic who does not do relics and was never particularly keen on St Theresa's style of spirituality'; he's far from alone in this, though it's interesting that even so he found himself going up to Aylesford out of curiosity last weekend, where he was particularly taken by the homily at the mass.


I tend to think of myself as not being a relics person, but if I'm totally honest with myself, that's nonsense. While I may laugh at the dubious provenance of such oddities as, say, St Thomas's finger, and while I stop short of kissing the feet of statues, that hasn't stopped me from kneeling in the Church at Calvary or by the tombs of St Peter and of St Francis of Assisi. I think the fact that whenever I'm in London I pray by the grave of Basil Hume is largely accidental, though; he just happens to be interred in a chapel that I love.

But still, if I think about it's pretty obvious that I've a thing for relics, and secular ones as much as religious ones. I've thrilled to see in Olympia the helmet that Miltiades wore at Marathon, and stood with a lump in my throat at the hill of Thermopylae, drank in one of Dickens and Chesterton's favourite haunts, ate in the Place du Forum in Arles, and been speechless at Dachau and Auschwitz. Arrayed along my shelves are a medley of keepsakes - a pebble from the Dead Sea and another from the Wadi Rum, a meaningless shard from Petra, a lump of rock from Mount Vesuvius, a chunk of bog oak from Mayo, the plastercast of a Carthaginian coin. Most of all, I keep all sorts of things because people who've meant something to me have touched them: letters written and cards made by friends, a ribbon that was once wrapped round a birthday present, old photographs, books signed by favourite authors. I'm hardly queasy about human remains, either: a few years back I spent a summer in Greece digging up ancient graves and carefully cleaning skeletons with toothbrushes and souvlaki sticks, and even now a medieval human skull grins down at my from my bookshelves.

The veneration of relics -- and it's veneration, not worship, so just respect and honour rather than adoration -- is a perfectly normal human instinct, drawing on the same characteristics that lead us to visit graves and museums. It's more than this, though; it's not just a combination of curiosity and sentiment. I'll explain tomorrow. For now, my bed calls.

Watching from the Touchline

I was glad to see today that Carter-Ruck backed down from their absurd attempt to prevent the Guardian reporting on a parliamentary question. I'm no wiser, though, as to what their ridiculous behaviour was intended to achieve; it was surely contrary to the British Constitution, it clearly wouldn't withstand a legal challenge, the question and answer would be recorded in Hansard no matter what, and this was guaranteed to draw bad publicity to their client Trafigura. And yes, there's such a thing as bad publicity.


Speaking of the Guardian, there's a piece in it today about St Thérèse of Lisieux, by one Sophia Deboick, who is currently conducting research into Thérèse's cult. The article, while not nearly as comprehensive or as fair-minded as Joanna Moorhead's Independent piece of a couple of months back, is well worth pondering. It's quite interesting in its way, though it makes me think of the bit in the introduction to Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, where he says:

'The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were plain clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward's castle; though they do not call an editor's office a coward's castle. It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it would be much truer of journalist. The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church; the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him. They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press about why the churches are empty, without even going there to find out if they are empty, or which of them are empty.

[...]

It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.'

I'm not saying that Sophia Deboick is theologically illiterate by any means, but it does seem that she comes across as someone studying religion from the doorway, neither in nor out. In amongst the useful historical stuff, explaining the way in which Thérèse's cult was initially fostered by her sisters, you get half-truths like this:

'Named a Doctor of the church on the centenary of her death in 1997, Rome now uses the radical, intellectual Thérèse to pay lip-service to calls for reform in the church's social attitudes. The current pope has made it abundantly clear that, for the church, virginity or motherhood are still the only acceptable states of female existence. While Thérèse represents the former, her own mother, Zélie Martin, who was beatified alongside Thérèse's father in October 2008, has become the church's poster-girl for ideal Catholic motherhood.'

If you think for a moment you'll realise it's nonsense to claim that the Church regards virginity and motherhood as 'the only acceptable states of female existence', let alone that the current Pope said this back in 2004.

One might respond to this, as one of the commenters does, that 'The alternatives are contraception, abortion, or infertility. The first two are sins, the last considered a misfortune rather than something to aspire to. This also applies to men. Men may aspire to be virgins or fathers of families.' These points are all good, albeit somewhat inconvenient for those who are determined to bash the Church, but despite being spot-on, they don't go far enough.

Look at what the article says: for the Catholic Church the only acceptable states of female existence are virginity and motherhood. In other words, if a girl has even once had sex, whether of her volition or not, she has no option, in the eyes of the Church, except to become a mother; once deprived of virginity, failure to achieve motherhood is unacceptable. What's more, by this reading, married women -- even widowed ones -- must become mothers; failure to achieve motherhood is unacceptable. Does anyone really think the Church believes this? Does anyone think it ever believed this?

Sure, Our Lady was both virgin and mother, but think of the popular western picture of St Mary Magdalene, apostle to the apostles, patron saint of sinners. Despite the fact that in the Bible she is described simply as someone from whom seven demons were cast, from the sixth century on she was conflated in the popular mind with Mary of Bethany and with the woman with the alabaster jar who anointed the feet of Jesus; as such she was regarded and venerated as a former sinner who had changed her ways and adopted a virtuous life, a reformed prostitute who was neither virgin nor mother, like St Paul someone who had gone and sinned no more. The saints are exemplars for us, but for the Church as imagined by Deboinck, such a change would be pointless: to her mind, once virginity is lost there is no salvation outside the maternity ward.

In the later Middle Ages, and you'll get this from even a cursory reading of The Canterbury Tales, it was clear that the Church back then tended to think of women as, in the main, virgins, wives, or widows. This was a bit of a caricature, but as a crude summary it has some merit. When I was an undergrad we used to make much of this, noting that medieval women were largely defined by what they were, whereas medieval men tended to be defined by what they did, though by Chaucer's day the classic division of men into oratores, bellatores, and laboratores had long faded into obsolescence, if it had ever been valid. Now, does anyone seriously think it's likely that the modern Church has an understanding of women that is markedly less nuanced than that of the medieval one?


The Guardian article had linked to a 2004 letter by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, saying that he had made it abundantly clear that virginity and motherhood were the only acceptable states of female existence. It's worth reading the letter, in which he says nothing of the sort. In the letter he expressly states that the 'feminine' values discussed in the letters are all, ultimately, human values, since the human condition of man and woman as created by God is one and indivisible. This means that both motherhood -- yes, motherhood -- and virginity are universal values, rather than exclusively female ones. How can this be?

'Although motherhood is a key element of women's identity, this does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation. In this area, there can be serious distortions, which extol biological fecundity in purely quantitative terms and are often accompanied by dangerous disrespect for women. The existence of the Christian vocation of virginity, radical with regard to both the Old Testament tradition and the demands made by many societies, is of the greatest importance in this regard.Virginity refutes any attempt to enclose women in mere biological destiny. Just as virginity receives from physical motherhood the insight that there is no Christian vocation except in the concrete gift of oneself to the other, so physical motherhood receives from virginity an insight into its fundamentally spiritual dimension: it is in not being content only to give physical life that the other truly comes into existence. This means that motherhood can find forms of full realization also where there is no physical procreation.'

I think this is one of those things we're meant to ponder and meditate upon, rather than to simply read and react to. The letter as a whole indeed sees motherhood -- or perhaps more importantly, the capacity for motherhood -- as the defining attribute of feminity, but uses both 'motherhood' and 'feminity' as codewords for 'the fundamental human value to live for the other and because of the other'. As for virginity, this is surely meant here not as a physical state which can be lost forever, but rather -- though it includes that -- as a synonym for celibacy, and thus as an ardent refusal to be defined purely by our bodies, a passionate determination to rise above our biological destiny. Heady stuff, you might think, and certainly not what might immediately grab you about it.

In thinking about this letter, it's important to remember to whom it was addressed: it was addressed to the bishops of the Church, who were probably assumed to be fairly clued in to the biblical and theological ideas underpinning the letter. If it might seem opaque to us, we shouldn't get annoyed; would we really expect a conference paper on astrophysics to be easily accessible to anybody who had just done science in school? Complex questions often require complex answers, after all.


Deboick's closing paragraph is a bit dodgy:

'The pilgrimage site of Lisieux is second only to Lourdes in terms of visitor numbers and many will feel they have derived genuine benefit from visiting the relics during this tour, but we must recognise this event as part of the agenda of a Catholic church whose social proscriptions have become obsolete and for whom political expediency comes before popular opinion.'

I had to go a-googling to decipher the first part of this: Lisieux is the second most popular pilgrimage site in France, receiving more than two million pilgrims every year. The rest of it is baffling, though, since although Deboick says we must recognise this, she never really says why. After all, all she has to say about the supposed political agenda of the Church in this affair is the unsubstantiated claim that the Church 'uses the radical, intellectual Thérèse to pay lip-service to calls for reform in the church's social attitudes'. Given that Deboick seems convinced that the supposedly obsolete social proscriptions of the Church include the belief that the only acceptable states of feminine existence are virginity and motherhood, which we know isn't true and has never been so, I think we should take her 'must' with a rather liberal dose of salt.


I was going to talk briefly about relics, and got sidetracked. Hmmm. Maybe tomorrow. Some more work now, though, and then bed.

Who Guards the Guardians?

Or 'who gags The Guardian?' at any rate. This is astonishing:

Guardian Gagged From reporting Parliament

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The Guardian has vowed urgently to go to court to overturn the gag on its reporting. The editor, Alan Rusbridger, said: "The media laws in this country increasingly place newspapers in a Kafkaesque world in which we cannot tell the public anything about information which is being suppressed, nor the proceedings which suppress it. It is doubly menacing when those restraints include the reporting of parliament itself."

The media lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said Lord Denning ruled in the 1970s that "whatever comments are made in parliament" can be reported in newspapers without fear of contempt.

He said: "Four rebel MPs asked questions giving the identity of 'Colonel B', granted anonymity by a judge on grounds of 'national security'. The DPP threatened the press might be prosecuted for contempt, but most published."

The right to report parliament was the subject of many struggles in the 18th century, with the MP and journalist John Wilkes fighting every authority – up to the king – over the right to keep the public informed. After Wilkes's battle, wrote the historian Robert Hargreaves, "it gradually became accepted that the public had a constitutional right to know what their elected representatives were up to".

So all The Guardian can reveal of this bizarre situation is that the case involves the London firm of solicitors Carter-Ruck. Guido Fawkes, clearly recalling events involving Trafigura last month, wonders whether the gagged question might be one from Paul Farrelly, MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme. It seems an obvious choice, given that the Trifagura story involved Carter-Ruck and was reported on by David Leigh, just like today's mysterious story, but it's hardly the only possibility. Of course, the next questions have to be whether the Guardian is the only paper to have received such a ban, and whether there are plans to sue half the internet for discussing this matter.

I just don't see the point anyway. After all, the question and the answer will both be a matter of record in Hansard in no time at all. Leaving aside the constiutional question, what are Carter-Ruck playing at?

Manchester, and the Indirect Route to Excellent Education

There was an article in Student Direct, Manchester's student newspaper, the other week, that got my proverbial goat. I don't have a real one, alas. Anyway, the guts of the article was that Alan Gilbert, current head honcho at the University of Manchester, has admitted that the undergraduate experience at Manchester isn't what it might be:

'Vice-Chancellor Alan Gilbert has publicly admitted that students at the University of Manchester do not receive a satisfactory student experience.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Beyond Westminster, Gilbert said: “I am not satisfied with the quality of undergraduate education in the University.”

He also branded it as “too impersonal” and not “sufficiently interactive”, adding that “the curriculum has been developed a little incrementally and has not been profoundly thought through.

“The student experience can be considerably improved.”

[...]

However, Gilbert implied that the main reason for the shortcomings was insufficient funding for the University, as the top-up fees introduced two years ago nation-wide to boost institutions’ finances were too low to actually achieve this.'

I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with things developing incrementally, that being the English way, but it's good that Alan G has recognised that things aren't what they might be in Manchester. He said this more than a year and a half ago too, of course, but still, it's nice that he's not forgotten.

In the 2009 National Student Survey, not merely does Manchester fall four percentage points below the national average for student satisfaction, but of the 154 institutions listed here, 120 do rather better than Manchester. For one of Britain's leading universities, this might strike you as shocking, but in a way it's not really surprising. Manchester tends to do extremely well in global research-based league tables, invariably being in the top handful of British universities on such lists, but its ranking in domestic league tables, which focus more on teaching and the actual educational experience at universities, is as a rule far less impressive: perhaps most dramatically, the Guardian's latest table has it at a feeble 32nd place!

What's going on? Is Alan Gilbert right to say that the University is insufficiently well-funded?

I don't think he is. In 2007, Manchester's income was around £637 million, more than that of any other University -- although to be fair, Oxford and Cambridge colleges have extra sources of income independent of the respective universities. In other words, Manchester has more money than almost any other educational institution in Britain. This shouldn't come as a surprise: Manchester is enormous, and probably, in real terms, the biggest university in the country. Even so, though, it sounds as though the system is under some strain.

Look, let's be fair. Manchester has made a strategic decision, which is to try to become one of the world's top 25 research-led institutions. It's throwing its resources into that, with the plan being to invest heavily in research and to do whatever it takes to recruit prominent academics so that other prominent academics will be drawn to Manchester. This seems to be working: Manchester is slowly working its way up the Shanghai Jiao Tong league table, which as far as Professor Gilbert is concerned, is the only ranking that matters.

The problem is that without limitless resources you can't cover everything. Frederick the Great put it well: he who defends everything defends nothing.

Elite universities may well be destinations of preference for many of the best students in the world, as Professor Gilbert said in outlining the University's 2015 strategy; they may well support excellence in teaching and provide students with a superb learning experience. It seems that Professor Gilbert really wants Manchester to become such a place. The thing is, that may not be possible just yet. It may simply be the case that there's not enough money to go round to do everything at once, and so a strategic decision has been taken to make teaching take a back seat. Professor Gilbert effectively admitted this back in February 2008, when he said there was a trend in most of Britain's leading institutions towards emphasising excellence in research at the cost of excellence in teaching. This, he conceded, was far from healthy:

'Whether you like it or not, universities are fundamentally about the education of students, both undergraduate and postgraduate ... it is clear that a university becomes non-viable unless it is a satisfactory destination for good students. There is a flaw in the business of a research university unless it is seen to be dedicated as much to the learning outcomes of students as to its research outcomes.'

Manchester, he said more than a year and a half ago, was taking steps to rectify this. Given dropping rankings in national league tables -- 24th to 32nd in the Guardian table and a drop from 81% to 77% in the National Student Survey -- it looks as though these steps might not be working, but maybe they will in time.

In the meantime, it'd probably be useful if the University honestly and openly defended its strategic decision to invest in research in order to join the ranks of the global academic elite, with a view to using that position and the wealth it hopes to generate through leadership in research to become a world-beater in teaching as well. If this means that the interests of Manchester's actual students of today are to come second to the interests of Manchester's imagined students of tomorrow, well, that's an unfortunate price that just needs to be paid. Sometimes you have to play a long game.

Seriously, this is a defensible position. I'm not sure I'd like to be defending it, given that students, parents, and taxpayers from all over the UK might have doubts about so much indirect long-term investment in the English north-west, but the case could be made, and probably should be.

Honesty's usually the best policy, after all.

Fry's Poles, or, How Context is Everything

It's unfortunate how certain things get picked up on and misrepresented in the media. A friend linked on Twitter earlier to this Telegraph article by Gerald Warner, which quotes a Channel 4 interview with Stephen Fry, citing Fry as saying:

'There’s been a history, let’s face it, in Poland of a right-wing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on.'

Warner goes on to argue that Fry was trying to imply that Auschwitz was a Polish institution, and attacks Fry for attacking Poles and Catholics, pointing out that both groups suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazis.

Before leaping to any conclusions, it's worth watching the interview right through to the end, as the 'offensive' comments start five minutes into a six-minute interview about the Tories having recently allied themselves in the European parliament with the Polish Law and Justice Party. Context is everything, after all, but even so, let's take a look at what he actually says at that point:

Jon Snow: Stephen Fry - innuendo or facts?
Stephen Fry: Well, I've read the manifesto statements that they've made about gay people. I know they suppressed in about 2004-5, I believe, a gay pride march, this party, quite specifically, and they used the most inflammatory language about it, and I'm glad Charles mentioned also the anti-semitic element of the party, and, I think, there’s been a history, let’s face it, in Poland of a right-wing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on, and know the stories, and know much of the anti-semitic and homophobic and nationalistic elements in countries like Poland. This is a problem that is not going to get smaller, because as we start to pay for the financial disaster of the last year, as the bill comes in, a kind of great pimpled acne of nationalism and homophobia and racism is going to erupt around Europe because there's going to be trouble with unemployment, there're going to be all the problems. Do you remember the 30s? The problem with the 30s was not that period, it was the end of the 30s, it's when you start to pay the price, and that's why it matters now to make a stand, because yes, you may say "we can influence them, it will all be good," but we have to understand things will get worse.

Okay, so he was kind of burbling, but his general point is clear, I think: every society has its dark side, and these dark elements gestate in dark times, so we ought to be alert to them now, and to be heading them off, rather than giving them credibility by allying ourselves with them. Societies that have been ground down tend to look for people to blame their problems on, with the most obvious candidates for scapegoat status being those 'others' who live among us, notably foreigners, gays, and gypsies.

What's this got to do with Poland, Auschwitz, and Catholicism, and indeed, what has it got to do with the Tories? In essence what Stephen Fry was saying was that all countries have their demons, and parties such as Poland's Law and Justice Party seek to gain power through summoning those demons; the problem is that these demons are very hard to control, and once at large can take on a life of their own.

Well, let's start with this: anti-semitism was rife in Poland in the first half of the twentieth century, and this anti-semitism became increasingly pronounced in the second half of the 1930s. There were anti-Jewish riots and assaults, and Jews were segregated in Polish universities, blocked from jobs in the civil service, and barred from joining the main trade unions for professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Unemployed Jews were denied welfare benefits, such as they were, and Jewish businesses were routinely boycotted, with shops being looted.

This wasn't a uniquely Polish phenomenon, of course. Anti-semitism was common through Europe at the time, and indeed the numbers of Jews in Poland rose during the interwar period, as Russian and Ukrainian Jews fled to Poland to escape pogroms in the Soviet Union; German anti-semitism, of course, goes without saying.* Sadly, Polish anti-semitism was closely intertwined with Polish Catholicism, not least because Catholicism was seen as the hallmark of the true Pole, just as in Ireland it was for so long seen as the hallmark of the true Irishman. The result of all this was that when Poland was carved up by Germany and Russia in 1939, the fate of the Jews wasn't a matter of huge concern to many Poles; as far as they were concerned, the Jews simply weren't Polish anyway.

That's not to say that all, or even most Poles were indifferent to the holocaust that was happening on their doorstep, just that some were, and in a country as big as Poland, 'some' translates to 'quite a lot'. The Nazis were almost as dedicated to the elimination of the Poles as they were to the elimination of the Jews, and so while many Poles responded to this by putting aside their differences with their Jewish neighbours, there was no shortage of Poles who felt that Polish lives mattered more than Jewish ones. After the war, Jews returning their homes in Poland were often met with hostility, and hundreds of Jews were murdered, 37 at the Kielce Pogrom alone. More than 100,000 Jews left Poland in the years immediately following World War Two.

It appears that anti-semitism may be on the rise in Poland at the moment, and sadly, this rise appears fuelled at least in part by certain strands of Polish Catholicism, with anti-semitic rants being a staple of the Catholic radio station Radio Maryja. This might seem particularly odd, and indeed it seems as though some Polish Catholics have almost chosen to forget the lessons of Auschwitz. I think this is what Stephen Fry was getting towards: the Nazis' worst crimes were committed on Polish soil, there were a fair few Poles that just didn't care, and it would be a tragedy if today's Poles were to forget this.

In this regard, it's worth remembering St Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who was killed in another's place in Auschwitz and who was canonised in 1982. Father Kolbe had clearly been at least mildly anti-semitic in the years prior to the German occupation, personally accepting without question such absurdities as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and with anti-semitic literature being published by the publishing press he ran. On the other hand, following more than two months of imprisonment after the Nazi conquest he sheltered and cared for perhaps as many as 2,000 Jews at his friary near Warsaw, tending to them as carefully and as lovingly as though they were Polish Catholics like himself. He's a useful lesson, and one well worth keeping in mind.

Catholicism, of course, ought never to be dragooned into the service of nationalism or called upon to justify anti-semitism or racism of any sort. Pius XI declared in 1938 that

'... in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our Patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the lofty thought which that fact expresses. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all Semites.'

A year earlier he had issued the German-language encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, drafted by the future Pope Pius XII, which condemned as idoloatrous and un-Christian the exaltation of race, nation, state, and political ideology:

'Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community—however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things—whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.'

Anti-semitism, therefore, is certainly never Catholic; sadly, however, this does not mean that Catholics are never anti-semites. The world would be a far better place if it were.

Stephen Fry's point seems clear, and it was most certainly not that the concentration camps at occupied Oświęcim were Polish institutions. We are living, he was saying, in a time of economic turmoil, and in such times it is all too often the tendency of the office boy to kick the dog. The Polish Law and Justice Party, he fears, have the look of a party that is seeking a dog to kick, and it troubles him that any British party should be standing beside them smiling benevolently while they do so.

In the afterward to the paperback edition of his autobiography, John Major summed up what he believed the European project was about and why it was worth fighting for: it was, he said, about keeping borders down, democracy in, and nationalism out. It seems a shame that his Conservative successors should have chosen to ally themselves with politicians who play on paranoia, who believe in bringing borders back up, and who rejoice in nurturing nationalism in its nastiest and most narrow-minded of forms.
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* Though we shouldn't subscribe to Daniel Goldhagen's sweepingly anti-German screeds, and again, there were of course some inspiring exceptions.

Fishy Claims About the EU

I'm afraid I made the mistake of getting into a spat today. Internet quarrelling isn't particularly edifying or worthwhile even at the best of times, and right now, time is hardly in great supply for me, even on days when lunch is eschewed and typing is done in abundance.

Over the last couple of days I'd spotted variations on this nonsense in a couple of spots around the net, generally in comment threads such as here and here*, so eventually, in annoyance, I popped over to the perpetrator's blog** to air my own thoughts. Folly, of course. There's no arguing with fools.

Seriously, look at this nonsense:

'Irish Ayes Are Smiling - More is the pity. This result may be perfectly clean, but it is still fishy: they have still lost in their fisheries three times as much as they have gained at all from the EU.'

This is a common anti-European trope, and a myth that the Irish fishing community appears to have to its bosom. It's rot, of course, unless you think it's meaningful in any sense to take direct Irish investment from our European partners and weigh it against the value of whatever fish have been caught by said partners in Irish waters. Even if you want to argue that said fish was worth €200 billion, rather than, say, €8.5 billion, as reckoned by the Sea Around Us project. Such a crude comparison is madness, of course.

For starters, Irish gains from the Union aren't limited to investments from our favourite charity, the German taxpayer. You need to look at trading gains too, and at private investment in the Irish economy as a player in the Common Market and as a member of the Eurozone. American companies have invested more in Ireland than they have in China, Brazil, India, and Russia; they employ more than 100,000 people, and export more than €60 billion worth of goods and services every year. So even if we had lost €200 billion worth of fish, well, there'd be no doubt that we'd still have gained. Sums, eh?

Secondly, at the time we joined the EEC, our waters were limited to a twelve-mile coastal strip. Our waters were only enlarged to a 200-mile zone in connection with the Third United Nations Law of the Sea Conference in 1976; the Americans and other countries claimed a massive extension of maritime jurisdiction, and so the EEC and others responded in kind. The new 'Irish' waters had traditionally been fished by German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, British and other fishermen, and had hardly ever been touched by Irish fishermen. How could they have been? There were fewer than 6,000 fishermen in the country, with fewer than 2,000 of them being full-time, and they fished in the main in our narrow coastal zone, catering to the tiny domestic market - we ate less fish than any other EEC country at the time, even with the Friday fast being regularly observed, fish providing scarcely 6% of our protein intake.

Is it really credible that a country with barely three million people in it would have been able to negotiate a 200-mile fishing zone without the aid of our European partners, especially if we'd planned on excluding them from our new waters immediately afterwards? And even if we had done that, how could we have exploited our new waters, with our tiny fleet of tiny ships, geared up to supply a none-too-enthusiastic domestic market? After all, I don't think we'd have got very far exporting our fish to countries where we'd put their fishermen on the dole... And then, of course, there's the question of how we'd have protected our waters. Could a handful of offshore patrol boats, and - back in the day - a couple of outdated corvettes really have done the job?

Is any of this likely to comfort our fishermen? Well, probably not, but for what it's worth, the Irish fishing industry is far healthier now than it was back in the day. Hard to believe, but true. Back then, like I said, there were fewer than 6,000 people involved in fishing in Ireland, with fewer than 2,000 of those being fulltime fishermen, and they weren't exactly making much money out of the operation. Now, though? I've had trouble pinning the figures down, because the fishing figure proper is rarely available in isolation, usually being blurred with onshore processing and with fish farming figures, but it looks like the total figure now is upwards of 15,000. Even if you take the lowest possible calculation it's still around 11,000. That's not to say they're not under pressure at the moment, due to changes in the Common Fisheries Policy to reflect the fact that fish stocks have been deracinated, but it's simply untrue to say that they -- and collectively we -- have been screwed on the fishing front over the last four decades. That's just not true.

And that's just yer man's first paragraph. On to he goes to claim that there was a built in one-for-one arrangement with Sterling well into the 1980s, rather than the late 1970s, to say that the British armed forces are largely Irish, when just 400 of their 112,000 personnel are from the Republic, and so on. Things are even odder in the comments, where he claims that the Irish wouldn't have minded being invaded by the British during the second World War, that the British would have been willing and able to protect us from the Soviets during the Cold War, and that there are a higher proportion of people in the Republic of Ireland who have served in the British forces than in any of the four constituent parts of the UK. I've been thinking for two days, and still don't think I know anyone from home who's done that, whereas as each hour passes I think of more and more people I know here who have served or are serving in the forces. Fourteen at the moment. And that's not including ones who are applying to Sandhurst and Dartmouth etc, let alone ones who've been in university units.

I can just about forgive his not grasping my point about economic independence, because it's a bit subtle, but I'll come back to that. Sigh...

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* This one nicely preempts Godwin's Law by invoking the Nazis in the very heading. Of course, it rather undercuts itself by calling on the Dunkirk spirit, in apparent disregard for the fact that Britain was only able to carry on 'alone' after Dunkirk by becoming a client state of the Americans. This was better than a compromise peace with the Nazis, of course, but it was hardly independence.
** His real blog. Not the ones spoofing or scorning it.

Normal Service Has Been Restored

There was a fabulous post on the Irish Election blog last year analysing six key reasons why Lisbon was voted down last year; today it returned to that post to consider what had changed this time out. It's fascinating reading.

The real question, of course, remains not why did Lisbon pass the second time out, but why did it fail the first time. Lisbon I was a huge anomaly in Irish voting on European matters. Take a look at this chart which shows the proportion of the electorate that has voted yes and no on the eight European referendums we've had.

Look at the No vote, and in particular, look at the No vote since Maastricht in 1992. Barring Lisbon I it's pretty consistent: 17.6%, 21%, 18.5%, 18.3%, 28.3%, 19.3%. It's basically 20%, isn't it, barring Lisbon I, when it rocketed to an anomalous 28.3%. Look at the Yes vote, then: it's all over the place, and is clearly dependent on how many people bother to vote. It was lower than the No vote for Nice I only because the total vote was tiny -- only 35% that time out. On six of the seven times when more than half the electorate has voted on the incorporation of a European Treaty into our Constitution, the positive vote has been far larger than the negative vote.

So what happened at Lisbon I, and what changed it at Lisbon II? Well, Simon says Lisbon I failed for six broad main reasons:

1. People felt they were being threatened by talk of Ireland being isolated if it voted no; Irish people tend not to take kindly to being bullied.
2. The leading advocated for the Treaty merely condescended to the people and their opponents, essentially just saying 'trust us'. The posters by the main parties said it all, really. There was no attempt to make a serious case for the treaty.
3. The main spokespeople for the yes side last time out just weren't up to the job. To this should be added the fact that last time out Fine Gael weren't as ardently European as they'd normally be, largely because they'd been offended by Cowen claiming they weren't playing their part. Again, we're a contrary bunch, and if you try to bully us, we'll usually do the opposite.
4. Voting no was presented as a pro-European option. I think this was the big one. The day after the vote I had friends vehemently insisting to me that they were very pro-European, despite having voted no. This was new.
5. Class voting was a factor last time out, with those who felt they've not done as well as they might have from the Celtic Tiger opposing the Treaty. I noticed this a lot working in the pub last summer. There was a smattering of xenophobia, and a fair dose of willingness to believe nonsense about European conscription, but in the main this was effectively just a protest vote against the establishment.
6. The Treaty itself was a problem, as it was perceived as inpenetrable -- I was the only person I met last year who actually spoke of having read it, and I was in the unusual circumstances of being very interested, very literate, and with a lot of time on my hands. More than 40% of people surveyed after last year's referendum said they'd voted no because they didn't understand the Treaty -- and loads more had voted no because of things that weren't in the Treaty! Given the Treaty's messiness it was very easy for all manner of myths to spread about it, whether about us intermittently losing a commissioner, which was going to happen anyway, or about us losing control of our tax regime, which we retained a veto on!

So what's different? Why did the No vote drop by 9% of the electorate and the Yes vote rise by 15% of the electorate? I think there were three main changes, two positive and one negative.

Broadly speaking, people were better informed this time than last year: there was a serious attempt by the mainstream parties to inform them, various independent groups sprang up to make the case for Lisbon, and the Referendum Commission was rather more vigilant than last year in quashing outright lies about the Treaty.

People also felt reassured by the guarantees from our European partners, promising that abortion in Ireland would remain an Irish competence, promising that our neutrality was our business, promising that our taxes would remain something for us to decide, and -- and this bit was new -- promising that the Council would rule that every country would retain a Commissioner. Granted, the guarantees aren't legally binding yet, but our European partners have been good to us so far, and -- perhaps barring the fishermen in Donegal -- we don't see any reason not to trust them.

The Economy, of course, is the negative factor. What do I mean by a negative factor? Well, I don't really think it drove people to vote yes, despite the Wall Street Journal's spin on this; it wasn't just that Irish people were scared and ran to Mummy. Rather, it was that Irish voters, now reassured by the guarantees and rather more clued in on the Treaty than last year, realised that this was no time for a protest vote. As the Irish Times put it, 'it finally came down to the economy and the ability of voters to distinguish between an unpopular Government and the issue of the treaty. The sophistication of the Irish electorate should never be underestimated.'

In other words, the economy didn't drive people to vote yes, but it did discourage them from voting no for frivolous reasons. If people voted no this time, they did so because they really don't like the Union. Sadly, the number who favour withdrawal seems to have risen from 9% to 18%. That's probably pretty much all the usual crowd, so. Their numbers have been pretty steady for the last twenty years.

Unfortunately, the fact that the Treaty had to be voted on twice has almost certainly caused this development. It hasn't looked good, although we have a long tradition of revisiting issues in referendums, what with the possibility of adopting a first-past-the-post voting system being voted on twice, divorce also being voted on twice, and abortion being voted on three times.

Still, the Constitution has changed now, and anyone who warbles about 'best out of three' might be better off thinking of this as a European tie, where it's one-all, but decided on goal difference, where the Yes Side scored 1,966,719 while the No Side managed a credible 1,457,021. Hmmm. That may not help.

Clearly I Didn't Need to Go Home

Irish Election sums it up nicely:

Total Electorate: 3,078,032

Total Poll: 58.99% (1,816,636)
Yes:67.11% (1,214,270)
No: 32.89% (595,142)
Spoiled Votes: 7,244
Miraculous Medals in Ballot Boxes: 2
Passports in Ballot Boxes : 1

28th Amendment to the Irish Constitution Treaty of Lisbon II is passed.

The changes in how the constituencies voted from last year are fascinating. The swing in Dublin South West and in my own constituency have been most encouraging. It's been interesting watching the tallies come in, and I've found it hard not to keep popping onto RTE to see how they were covering the treaty.

The situation in Donegal isn't encouraging, though. Is this a right-wing Catholic vote? Or is it connected with fears for the fishing industry? Probably the latter, though I can't see how the proposed institutional arrangements under Lisbon could be worse than the current ones.

Still, all told it's been a good day.

Fingers Crossed On Lisbon

It seems there have been a couple of sketchy opposition exit polls that indicate it's a win for the 'Yes' side. Fine Gael are giving it 52% yes and 48% no, while Young Fine Gael are giving it 60% yes and 40% no. There's no telling how scientific these polls have been, though, and the figures should probably be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Still, though, this is encouraging.

I have a few friends who are perplexed about my support for Lisbon, since they can't see how this is good for Ireland. Leaving aside how they're often using 'Ireland' as a stand-in for 'Britain', fo me it's ultimately a no-brainer.

In general our interests are in tune with Britain and our other partners on the mainland: making our collective voice clearer and louder will give us more influence than we've been, and we'll need that influence down the line if we want there to be a European voice at the table where America and China and figuring out which way the world'll go. Giving the national parliaments a couple of months to go through proposals before the Council votes on them is surely a good thing, and having the Council vote in public on them has to be the most overdue of reforms. And like I've said, Lisbon gives us a mechanism to leave if we ever decide we'd be better off outside the tent.

It's not perfect, of course. In particular, I'm not convinced that the European parliament is other than a well-intentioned waste of money. It's a good idea, in that it's nice to have someone who directly represents you, rather than your country, in the European institutions: crudely put, the Parliament represents the people, the Council represents the countries, and the Commission represents the Union as a whole. And yes, I know big corporations and NGOs spent a fortune trying to lobby MEPs, and that there those who argue it's incredibly powerful. But barring how it can sack the Commission -- which is a very important capability, usefully applied once already -- I'm just not sure it works in practice.

The German Supreme Court was right when it said it's an assembly rather than a parliament, not least because as a rule its seven groupings operate in a consensual way, rather than as a government and and an opposition. Given the need to allow the small countries to have any kind of presence at all, electoral equality has to be disregarded, so that a Maltese vote goes thirteen times further than a German one; there's no way this is going to change, so a fully and equally enfranchised European demos isn't on the cards.

I get annoyed too whenever the Parliament votes to promote universal access to abortion across the Union. This isn't a pro-life point I'm making, I should explain: it's a sovereignty one. Ever since the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, it's been a staple of European law that abortion in Ireland is an Irish issue to be ruled on by the Irish people. Despite this, every so often there's a proposal in the parliament that disregards this. The most recent one I can think of was in January 2009, when the Parliament approved a motion by Giusto Catania of the Italian Communist party which drew on the -- as yet unratified -- Charter of Fundamental Rights and called on the Union to promote the right to abortion everywhere in the Union. Back in September 2004 there was a bit of a rumpus about a Portuguese attempt to ban the Dutch 'Women on Waves' ship from entering Portuguese waters; this sparked a debate about whether abortion should be permitted across the whole EU, with Vasco Graca Moura, a Portuguese MEP, making the astute point that the debate was a complete waste of time, as 'termination of abortions falls under the competences of member states'. In July 2002 the Parliament formally approved a report presented by the Belgian MEP Anne van Lancker which urged increased access to abortion facilities across the Union.

Obviously, as I've said in the past, I'm pro-life, but that's not the issue here. This is a matter of sovereignty. In the broad sense, abortion is regarded as a health issue in EU law, and health issues are considered national competences rather than pan-European ones; more narrowly, Irish arrangements regarding abortion are specifically protected as being a Irish problems that require Irish solutions; either way, votes and debates on these issues shouldn't have an implications for Ireland, and yet they're treated in the Parliament as though they do. You might wonder why they happen at all, really.

On that, I'd say that these votes, of course, never create binding obligations, as the Parliament is primarily a consultative body, rather than a legislative one. I'm pretty sure this is the only reason these debates are allowed. If the Parliament were to be granted teeth, it would also need to be given a muzzle.

Of course, all this means that the EU is, and shall remain an association of sovereign states, rather than a 'super-state', which you'd think the No campaigners would like. Of course, that'd require them to close their mouths and then open their minds for a bit. Have you seen any flying pigs lately?