Book buyer interest is reaching a crescendo in relation to the authoritarian, stultifying and cruel Ireland of the second half of the twenty-first century, the period that gave us such things as Mother-and-Baby homes, Magdelene Laundries, systemic institutional child abuse and its egregious coverup, and the attempted control of the free movement of citizens to maintain state control over women's bodies.
For over 46 years I've been having my letters published in The Irish Times. Particularly strong within them has been the argument, in a lucid and forceful voice, and carried consistently over the years, for a separation of church and state, especially in education. Who knows, the letters might even have had an effect, however small, on the process of enlightenment.
Divorce referendums, morality and the law, religious glorification of violence, religion in schools, child abuse, celibate clergy, "aggressive secularism", abortion and the Repeal the Eighth campaign, religious oaths for public office; these are the letters which, along with linked memoir writing in THE RECONSTITUTION OF IRELAND, chart Ireland's journey from the depressing country that had demonised Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, Brendan Behan, among many others, and had made a misery of the lives of so many, to the internationally respected, liberal nation we have today.
There are letters on Ireland in the European Union, the financial crisis, the bishop who set up an exorcism team, gun violence in the US, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Cystic Fibrosis, Ursula von der Leyen and the war in The Middle East, Irish neutrality, Ukraine, wine bottle corks, books, and so many other topics of abiding interest.
The Reconstitution of Ireland is also a memoir. The letters are reproduced as they appeared in the paper, from the Irish Times archive, and each one is accompanied by prose which discusses its context, both in my life and in the country at large.
The title of the work is deliberately chosen to resonate with the English Language translation of Bunreacht na hEireann, The Constitution of Ireland, which has been appealed to by all sides in the arguments around the desirability or otherwise of a secular state in Ireland.
