Talk:Constitution of Ireland
This information may be of some use to people seeking to understand Irish government and politics. JTD
Moved from main text: "Modern pluralist concepts of religious neutrality only date from the second half of the twentieth century." The US constitution is among the earlier (notably Enlightenment) documents that reflect this concept.
More generally, this article needs NPOV'ing, but I'd like someone who knows more about Irish history to attempt it. Vicki Rosenzweig
What the above sentence meant was that many of Europe's constitutions enshrined the religious supremacy of one faith (Norway and Britain among others still have established state churches!, while even the Italian Republic's constitution recognised Roman Catholicism has having a special role, until a recent change). In the 1920s, with the fall of many ancient states after World War One, a new style of populist democratic constitution appeared (Austria, Weimar Germany, Irish Free State) which left religious issues to one side, arguing that the state should be neutral on matters of faith. By the 1930s, a backlash occured, with new constitutions abandoning what was seen as the trendy liberalism of the 1930s and returning to what could be called 'faith and fatherland', old cultural symbols such as religion and nationalism.
The United States constitution is a special case that in reality is of no relevance to the Irish debate. Its religious neutrality was a product of its period, its underlying principles and also its need to deal with an American society that was made up of many religious groupings, none of which had a history of dominance that occured in Europe (hence the appearance of so many religious migrants who found that, whatever their faith, they were in a discriminated against minority because of their beliefs in their home country.)
I probably could have expressed it better, but Vicki is as so often happens looking at the world from an American perspective. What I wrote was correct in an Irish context. The Catholicism in the Irish constitution pretty much matched the religious nature of European constitutions, not of the enlightenment but of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which is the context from which de Valera's Bunreacht na hÉireann must be judged. Had it been written in the era of fashionable liberalism it would have been different. Had it appeared in the post-World War II era, again it probably would have been different. But in that time it fitted into a standard pattern, and can only be judged in that context. The US constitution and the burst of enlightenment is irrelevant to all of that. I will be editing my page to express this is a different manner. JTD