When Éamon de Valera was leaving Áras an Uachtaráin in 1973, he sent an invitation to RTÉ staff to come out and visit. Buses lined up and the newsroom emptied as people took their chance to see the Áras and Dev. I stayed behind. Apart from the fact that Dev was about as popular in our house as the Pope in Ballymena, he represented so much of what was wrong with our country.
Dev and his 1937 Constitution, with its “special position” for the Roman Catholic Church and its ban on divorce and contraception, set in stone a confessional Catholic state. Catholics and Protestants were educated separately, socialised separately, and rarely intermarried, largely due to the Catholic insistence that children of mixed marriages be brought up Catholic.
In my school education, being Catholic was seen as more important than being Irish. The tribe was more important than the State.
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