EMPATHY IS A NATURAL INSTINCT FOR PEOPLE
DICK SPICER HAS ALWAYS BEEN A DRIVING FORCE IN CULTURAL CHANGE AND WAS THE FIRST TO SET UP THE HUMANIST ASSOCIATION FOR NON-RELIGIOUS
‘HUMANISM in a nutshell is being good without God, believing that you can live an ethical life as a human being without having to invoke an outside power or rewards in heaven or punishments in hell,’ said Dick Spicer, speaking from the garden of his home in Bray.
‘In other words, having empathy with other human beings is a natural instinct of humans and we believe that you can live that sort of life.
‘Now of course that instinct can get perverted and diverted and so forth but nonetheless humanism believes that we can try and encourage that within us.’
Dick said that he is often reminded of a saying attributed to all sorts of ethnic groups. ‘That we all have different wolves within us, and whichever wolf you feed becomes the dominant’.
So in that way, people become what they live. ‘How you behave feeds into and reinforces an ethical decision to approach life in that way.’
He said that there is no rigid dogma in Humanism, but a simple belief that humans have an ethical principle within you.
‘It makes sense. That’s how humans actually thrive and get on. It gets you through. It’s not for nothing that humans have developed a social empathy, look at this crisis today.’
He believes that the Covid-19 emergency is in fact bringing out the best in people.
‘It makes you proud to be Irish doesn’t it?,’ said Dick. ‘When you look at the mess that other societies are making of it. The way our society has pulled together, it does your heart good.’
Dick has always read a huge amount and came across Humanism as a young man. He was around 13 when he lost religious belief.
‘I was watching television and I was just coming up to 13. Something went wrong with the television and I made a quick prayer - please God, fix that. Shortly after that a thing came on about all these starving people. And it just hit me, there was I asking for the television to be fixed. If there was a God, he wouldn’t be interested in my piddling problem. From that moment the whole thing just seemed absurd.’
Later, the first referendum on divorce was coming up in Ireland. ‘We had a young child and we were thinking about problems with schools, and there was the whole agitation for divorce. I got involved with that.’
The first referendum was lost in 1986, but that was only the start of campaigning for Dick.
‘I had felt for a year or two that something was wrong with just focusing on one issue. I felt it actually needed a culture change in the society before you could make major changes.’
He wanted campaigners to tackle a whole range of issues rather than focus on one, and get people to see that it’s not democratic to impose one particular religious view by law on everyone.
‘I suggested that we establish an organisation campaigning to separate church and state. I listed out the various things - divorce, abortion, schooling, censorship, human rights for gay people and so on. There were about six or seven issues.’
He spent about a year trying to encourage people to participate, and eventually got a campaign together. They set up a committee and the first meeting of the campaign to separate church and state was addressed by Mary Robinson. ‘We ended up with quite a clatter of people involved. It became quite influential,’ said Dick.
He wrote an article for an American magazine, explaining that Ireland was the only country in the world that had in law the entire programme of the Moral Majority organisation in the States. ‘No other country in the world had that,’ he said. ‘In other words there was censorship, homosexuality was banned, divorce was banned - you name it.
‘We were absolutely unique,’ said Dick.
Soon after, the nuns who owned Carysfort teacher training college in Carysfort Avenue decided to sell the property.
‘The state had put £11 million into this over the previous few years. They were going to sell it for £20 million and they weren’t going to give the state anything,’ said Dick.
‘We lived in a very small cottage in Rialto,’ he said. Various people on the committee had said if he lost his house, there would be a whip around. ‘But there were no guarantees.
‘I took a case in the High Court against the state for the endowment of religion, because it’s forbidden in the constitution. I was arguing that because they hadn’t tied up with any contract the money they had invested, that they were illegally endowing religion. The developers got worried and said they were going to pull out of the purchase. So then the nuns had second thoughts and they said they’d give the state back two or three million. So I said fine, I’m calling that a victory! In the end the state got back two and a quarter million.’
He was amused in the aftermath by the number of people who said he should have stuck with the case.
‘I was putting my neck on the block, where were they?’
They took a case about chaplains in community schools being paid by the state and lost that in the High Court, with an award being made against them. But because they had formed a limited company that was never pursued.
During the latter phases of the campaign to separate church and state, Dick had a page on the back of the Church and State magazine dedicated to humanism. ‘People began to contact us asking how could they have a non-religious funeral,’ he said. ‘And so we actually carried out one or two funerals. I think the first one was in Mayo. And then we began to get enquiries about weddings, how could people have a non-religious ceremony.
‘I began to realise that we really needed a Humanist Association in Ireland.’ The campaign gave him the magazine space and he and a number of others decided to set up a Humanist Association to cater for the non-religious. ‘We began to see that there was a need to cater for the non-religious community, who we could see were growing. So we launched the Irish Humanist Association.’
RTÉ did a half-hour ‘Would you Believe’ programme about the group, and Dick, along with Ellen Sides, wrote a book on Humanism.
The establishment of the association was not without its detractors.
‘Just before we launched it officially, a couple of months before the programme when we got our group together, the Bishop of Limerick Jeremiah Newman issued a statement saying secular humanism is on the prowl in Ireland and they’re worse than the Nazis. This was because we were challenging the ethical dominance or monopoly saying you could actually be good without religion. As soon as he said that we said, we have to go for it now.’
Dick got a bullet in the post once, but didn’t take it seriously. ‘I don’t pay any attention to the negative,’ he said.
The association kept growing, with membership now in the thousands. With branches in almost every county, each local group meets regularly and they have speakers and discussions.
Most Bray members would have attended the Dun Laoghaire branch. A group was just about to start meeting in the Harbour Bar as lock-down came, so that’s on hold for now. ‘Once we can meet again, we will,’ said Dick. He said that they have around 20 names of new members in Bray, aside from those who are already members.
You don’t need to be a member to have a Humanist ceremony. ‘Up until this I think we were doing between 3,000 and 4,000 weddings a year, and it’s going up each year,’ said Dick. ‘We’ve got about 36 celebrants in Ireland.’
Dick is winding down a bit, having been doing it for nearly 30 years. ‘I’ll only take on a certain amount now. I took on about eight for this year.’
All the celebrants are legal registrars of marriage. He enjoys the day very much. ‘It’s powerful to see people so happy and to feel you are helping them.
‘We put a lot into these weddings. Apart from responding to enquiries and telephone and email stuff, and putting together the script, I meet couples twice before the wedding in order to get to know what they want, to put together the whole thing. That’s two evenings plus the wedding day. And the wedding day is the day, you can’t do another wedding… it would be too much.’
He said that there is an emotional investment on the day which would take a lot out of the celebrant. ‘If there wasn’t you’d be a phoney, wouldn’t you? The day you stop feeling is the day to stop doing it.’
Funerals are always difficult. ‘But if somebody has lived a good life and they’ve left behind happy people and they feel they’ve had a good life, they’re not tragedies. I think that’s an important thing… the leaving of life happens to us all. And it’s not necessarily a tragedy. It can be a little bit sad, and the person might be sad leaving and other people might be sad they’ve got to go or they’ve gone. But you balance that against the life they’ve had and the memories.’
He described doing a funeral for a young child, for whom he had done the naming ceremony and whose parents he had married. ‘Boys oh boys, that was hard,’ said Dick.
‘But even if somebody only lived for a very short period of time you would try and relate to the joy they brought.’
His work continues when necessary.
A couple of years ago Dick and his son Norman lodged a case against the state when it looked like the new national maternity hospital would be under religious control. They withdrew it when the sisters agreed to step back from direct control.
Meanwhile, Dick said he couldn’t have done anything without the support of his wife Annie, who is an artist.
‘She has had to put up with my part time wage for decades!’
The Humanist Association of Ireland can be found online at humanism.ie.
WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE MESS THAT OTHER SOCIETIES ARE MAKING OF IT. THE WAY OUR SOCIETY HAS PULLED TOGETHER, IT DOES YOUR HEART GOOD