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GAZETTE
JULY-AUGUST 1979
Public and Private Morality
It is impossible to delineate with absolute precision the
specific fields of public and private morality. Here
reasonable men may differ from time to time and culture
to culture. Nevertheless, the immediate issue we are
dealing with here is clearly legislation on public morality,
affecting the common good and this has to be borne in
mind in considering changes in such legislation.
Where law has already intervened in the field of public
morality, as in the present case, there are sound reasons
for resisting the lowering of legal moral standards. A
presumption favours retention of an existing law, and the
burden of proof falls on those who advocate change, not
on those who wish to preserve the status quo. It is also
true that a great many people are incapable of making a
distinction between morality and the law and what law
can or should do about morality, and, since they tend to
take their moral standards from the law, a change in legal
attitude can imvolve a really fundamental change in their
moral attitudes. The law must, of course, in the long run,
reflect the beliefs of the citizens, because it ultimately
depends on their consent.
The Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference in a statement
in June 1976 emphasised that the impact on society
should be the key consideration in making or changing
laws with a public morality content. But this social
dimension of the matter is usually ignored. The question,
instead, is debated in the false context as to whether the
State should impose Catholic moral teaching on all,
irrespective of their beliefs. The most important question
to be answered in considering the proposed change in our
marriage laws is the social aspect. The institution of
marriage and the family with its associated morality are
fundamental for community well-being.
The values at stake here are the:—
welfare of children — their maintenance, education,
happiness and security;
welfare of the partners — support in adversity,
security in old age
Welfare of the community — certainty of
parenthood, harmony in sexual relationships
concern that the old and weak are not exploited.
Divorce is of its very nature a matter of public morality
and is really central to the marriage institution.
Impact of Divorce
We must, therefore, consider scientifically and
objectively the impact of divorce on the stability of family
life; on the well-being of the children involved; their
physical well-being, their emotional well-being, etc. We
must consider the demands on State finances to cater for
such children; the issue of authority in society and even
the relevance of the evident spread of violence in our
society.
The social consequences of state divorce are already
well charted. Experience teaches us that where state
divorce has been introduced it tends to get more and more
out of hand and comes to undermine radically the whole
meaning of marriage as a community institution. The
stability, of marriage and family life is weakened
inexorably and progressively. It is a fact of experience
that divorce legislation becomes even more lax in
subsequent acts of legal reform, and that the possibility of
divorce and the threat of divorce leads to insecurity in
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marriage and too little effort at reconciliation. What
begins as a remedy for human failure introduces further
and further insecurity and lack of confidence so that the
whole institution of marriage is placed in jeopardy.
There is no reason to think that a system of civil
divorce introduced into Ireland would operate differently
from divorce anywhere else, or that it would prove
immune to an inexorable; widening of divorce grounds. In
practice, as our world experiences it, divorce does not
operate responsibly. It tends to erode the values of family
stability and security for child and partner, and
introduces greater evils than those which it sets out to
cure.
One can sympathise sincerely with the motives of those
who endeavour to introduce divorce legislation. We are
all aware, unfortunately, of broken marriages. We tend to
hear more and more frequently of irretrievably broken
marriages. By far the great majority of marriages do work
more or less successfully, and, of course, all marriages, if
they are to be reasonably successful, call for a degree of
discipline and effort. It is, nevertheless, a fact that the
incidence of marital breakdown is on the increase, and it
is a problem for the law to know how best to deal with it.
No one can pretend to provide the perfect solution. A
valid criticism of divorce is that it does not solve the
problem of irretrievably broken marriages. While it gives
relief, of a kind, to existing ones, there is strong evidence
that it tends to create by its very existence even more and
more broken marriages as time goes on. Divorce is now
proposed as a solution, but to what problem? It appears
to be a problem which has not been comprehensively
researched or analysed in the first place. It is very
probable that, if the causes of marital upsets and
breakdowns were analysed on a comprehensive basis, it
would be found that very many of the factors leading to
broken marriages could be eliminated by reasonable
and evolutionary modifications of existing law, and by
appropriate administrative action, thus reducing the
volume of marriages which could be factually classified as
irretrievably broken down.
Alternatives
There are other avenues also which could be explored
with a view to relieving many of the real stresses,
difficulties and hardships which undoubtedly, in our
modern environment, exist in marriages. For example,
some of the really hard cases could be met by widening
the grounds on- which marriages under civil law can be
declared null. Many of our matrimonial laws do in fact
offer prospects of a solution to a number of the agonising
problems of broken marriages e.g. the provision of a
system of properly secured settlements, as well as
properly secured maintenance for separated wives with
their children, an adequate extension of matrimonial relief
to cases of desertion and re-definition of matrimonial
'cruelty' on a broad basis for the purpose of divorce a
mensa et thoro.
There is, too, a need for careful and thorough pre-
marriage preparation and instruction. It is simply not
possible, by means of any legal or social institution, to
prevent all forms of marital disharmony and breakdown.
It is possible, however, by the type of preparation which
ought to precede the adoption of any serious vocation in
life to avoid a number of difficulties which might
otherwise prove disastrous. Everyone acknowledges, too,