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| 1995 campaign poster. Jesus says no; Ireland said yes. Now Ireland says more, by a massive majority. |
In another massive rejection of the teaching and advise of the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland, the Irish people have voted to liberalise their divorce laws in a referendum held on Friday.
The scale of this shift away from Catholic teaching can be gauged by the scale of the vote in favour of liberalisation compared to the vote to allow divorce in 1995. In 1995, the majority in favour of divorce itself was a mere - 50.3%. Friday's referendum gave an 82.1% vote in favour of the liberalisation of it.
Under the 1995 Act, a couple need to be separated for four of the previous five years before a divorce can be granted. The referendum proposal was to delete this clause and allow the Dáil to determine this minimum time period. The government had indicated that it would reduce this to two years if the referendum voted in favour.
In recent years, the Republic of Ireland has voted by substantial majorities to legalise same sex-marriages, to legalise abortion, to abolish the blasphemy law and now to liberalise divorce, all of which would have been unthinkable in the conservative, Catholic Ireland of just a generation ago. This shift in public opinion and rejection of the church as the conscience of the people has come about, at least in substantial part, because of the scandals of child abuse by nuns and priests when allowed virtual autonomy and their cover-up by the church heirarchy.
The Catholic Church is now seen as arrogant, deeply hypocritical, self-serving, untrustworthy, casually abusive and uncaring. Any moral authority it once had has long since gone. Tweet
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