Postcards from the Edge

As Ireland grows more secular, Christian marriage rites are turning Celtic, says Mary Kenny

Should oldies in a new (ish) relationship get hitched?

Some might like to but are perhaps concerned about the legal and inheritance implications for the offspring of a previous marriage.

But there is an Irish solution on offer. You can have a beautiful ‘vow ceremony’ which ritualises a couple’s partnership: it is binding in symbolism but not in law.

Clara Malone is a charming young woman in Ennis, County Clare, whose Coastal Ceremonies provides an alternatives to church or legal procedures. Ennis is near Shannon airport, and on the Wild Atlantic Way coast – a fabulous location for any event. Nearby are the dramatic Cliffs of Moher, and some couples have taken their vows with that fabulous view in the background (regrettably, also a suicide site, but we’ll leave that aside).

Clara, a registered celebrant, offers couples a variety of commitment and ‘vow’ ceremonies, with the option of the ancient Celtic ritual of ‘hand fasting’ – ribbons are entwined in the couple’s hands as a symbol of their bond.

Ireland is becoming more secular, but there’s a noticeable need to find new rituals to replace older rites of passage. Baby-naming ceremonies are a commendably sought-after alternative to christening. If you’re not going to have a child baptised, do something else instead.

Clara, who is married herself – traditionally, in a Catholic church – with two children, will perform a graceful commitment ceremony for oldies at around £400. This will make them feel mystically and emotionally bound in their relationship, but leave the legal implications untouched (and so appease offspring worried about oldie stepparents trousering the spondulicks).

The source of much current gender ‘wokeness’ – pick your own gender from the spectrum – is, in my view, the French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir. This is the 70th anniversary of her hugely influential book The Second Sex, published in 1949.

De Beauvoir hammered home two themes. Nature was the enemy of women’s liberation, woman a ‘plaything’ of the species. Secondly, as with Sartre’s existentialism, we must live by ‘choice’.

Choice was paramount, and the concept flowed from the Left Bank in the 1940s into every possible realm of our lives, from 27 varieties of toothpaste to what gender we ‘choose’ to be, at age 13.

There’s no denying de Beauvoir was a monumental figure, but she didn’t always practise what she preached.

During the Vichy regime in France, she had a job working for state radio. She also signed a formal document saying, ‘I am not a Jew.’ When asked, decades later, why she had collaborated in this way, she answered: ‘I had no choice!’

Philosophers often seek a theory for the explanation of everything: I believe I have the explanation for most social and political change.

I call it ‘the corrections’. Everything is a reaction to what happened before. The metropolitan police once targeted gay men in ‘entrapment’ schemes. Now, as a correction, they make a point of full participation in Gay Pride parades.

British history once taught that the

Empire was a civilising mission – even Lefties like Denis Healey took that view. As a corrective reaction, universities now feel they have to agree that the British Empire was a cruel form of exploitation.

Women, in the past, didn’t always get the opportunities they deserved, and most didn’t play a visible role in public life. The correction means that ‘toxic masculinity’ is now in the dock and females must be favoured at every turn.

‘The correction’ sometimes means ‘the overcorrection’.

And that’s partly why Ireland was favoured with so much power in the Brexit negotiations. For 800 years, Britain has been the more dominant of the two islands, and has always held power – colonial, military, financial, linguistic, cultural and sometimes religious (as when Anglican tithes were imposed) – over Ireland.

But when it came to the cliff-hanging aspect of Brexit, Ireland, supported by the rest of the EU, now held the power. It was all down to Dublin’s reaction. History’s correction. (At the time of writing, Britain hadn’t yet left the EU; forgive me if things have changed.)

Not only the power, but often the sympathy, too. I listen to Remainer Brits who have acquired Irish passports lamenting how horrid England was to Ireland; now they aim to compensate.

But life – like history – is always more nuanced than these pendulums suggest. There were good and bad imperialists. There were always women who got their way, even under ‘the patriarchy’.

And although British rule in Ireland was often repressive and neglectful, it wasn’t all bad. There were the railways, the canals, the drainage system, the Georgian buildings, the rule of law, and the English language which Irish writers have come almost to dominate, in another sweet ‘correction’.

Twitter: @Marykenny4