Interview with Senator Rónán Mullen

1.

In the past you have worked as a press secretary, lecturer and journalist. Since 2007 you have a seat in the Seanad. Have you always wanted to go into politics?

No. It evolved. I have always been interested in talking. And for most of my adult life I have wanted to say things that are truthful and relevant, consistent with the sense of justice that was bred into me, and influenced by other people whom I have admired.

When I was in national school, I wandered into the “Masters” room where the teachers were on their break. I must have been asking them questions, perhaps about an old abacus standing by the wall. The schoolmaster, the late Joe Ferry, said something like, “Will you be a barrister when you grow up, Sir?” For a long time afterwards, I didn’t know what a barrister was but later, when I became a barrister for a short while, I thought about what he said. Some years later, still a child, I was at the dentist. I must have talking a bit because the dentist nicknamed me “the politician”. Not very flattering but he must have spotted something.

It was a combination of things over time that led me to run for the Seanad. My family, especially my mother, encouraged me in my faith, to read at Mass and to get involved in things. I did the “Lit and Deb” college debating scene in UCG and enjoyed the people and performance side, even though I was quite homesick and unsettled for the first two years in UCG. I met good friends there during the emerging debates on abortion and that shaped my willingness to campaign for what I believe in, even against the grain of the culture, so to speak. I got elected to the Students Union which brought me into contact with the media and led to my doing a Masters in Journalism. That and further campaigning led me to an interview opportunity for a job as a press officer in the Dublin diocesan press office. I spent five and a half years in that role where I practised explaining, and helping others to explain, the reason for the hope the Church has. That led to an opinion column in the Irish Examiner after I left the job in Drumcondra. And in 2006, no longer working in a role that might prevent politics, I got the idea to try for the Seanad in order to advance the values I had come to believe in and express professionally.

2.

Do you see yourself staying in politics? You are an independent senator, though during the year you founded the Human Dignity Alliance as a new political party. What are your hopes for that party?

I am not in love with politics or with being in Leinster House. It is a means to certain ends that I believe in, which are to speak up for and promote certain ideas and values and to try and influence culture over time. Given the drift of our public culture at the moment, it could certainly be said that I am playing the long game. But I do believe that what we say and do now, in adverse conditions, playing against the wind and all that, can lay the groundwork for and give encouragement to a future generation who can bring about better, more just, laws.

Being independent has been important for me to have the freedom to say what I believe and to advance the policy and legislative ideas that I and many others want to progress. The recent abortion debate has shown us that even when political parties pretend to allow freedom of conscience and free votes, they don’t really. Backbenchers and would-be Dáil candidates, would-be Committee chairpersons and would-be Ministers all know what side their bread is buttered on and many are afraid to step out of line. But we shouldn’t put it all down to ambition either. We can’t ignore the fact that politicians, like everyone else, are prone to conditioning by media and popular culture. Many people have absorbed, uncritically, some very strange ideas. It takes strength of character and good formation to resist the avalanche of nonsense coming at you. A lot of our politicians remind me of the subjects of the “Milgram Obedience Experiment” which space prevents me from getting into here but which is worth looking up!
As for the Human Dignity Alliance, it is one political initiative that may, in time, bear fruit. But my role as a University Senator is not the best place from which to build a new political movement, and others will move faster in the short time. That’s ok by me. Human Dignity Alliance will be there in the constellation in due course. In the meantime, I encourage people to also look at what Renua is offering and also Peadar Toibin’s new movement which could be very exciting. I do think that Peadar, apart from being in the Dáil, has the political background, personal and organisational skills to make something positive happen. Time will tell.

I am not against people staying and working for the good in the existing political parties. But when you see only four Fianna Fail TDs and no Fine Gael TD voting against the abortion legislation, despite strong opposition in the country and among their party memberships, you see the corrupting and crippling impact of bad political leadership.

3.

The “Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Bill” has been signed into law by President Michael Higgins. You were one of the most vocal opponents of the bill in the Oireachtas. Are you disheartened by this?

In 2013 they legislated for the X case which permitted abortion on a non-evidence based ground involving risk to life from threat of suicide. We could see then that this was a momentum-builder for a full-scale assault on the 8th Amendment. A friend of mine said something that time which stayed with me, something like “OK, let them allow the killing of little babies. It won’t stop us from doing our work trying to shape a pro-life culture.” He wasn’t being fatalistic. He was accepting that we are not always in control in the short term. Things can and will happen that we do not like and that go against our deepest sense of right and wrong. To say the “sky won’t fall” is not to say that no harm will be done. It is simply to say that the sky won’t fall until the Lord allows it to fall. So panic and depression and despair are both ahistorical and unChristian responses. The temptation to these feelings is understandable. But the giving-in to them is unacceptable. Horrible things have happened before and will happen again in the future. There is nothing new about humanity turning on itself. Our job as lovers both of God and of humanity is to continually rebuild and work for a better world. Those are the values I constantly believe in and constantly fail to fully live up to.

4.

In the past three years the Irish people have voted in favour of same-sex marriage, and resoundingly in favour of abortion last May. The drive towards radical liberalism in Ireland appears to be unstoppable. Many think it is only a matter of time before euthanasia is introduced here. Do you feel you are fighting for a lost cause?

No. But I may not be around for our victory celebrations. At least not in any earthly sense.

Martin Luther King’s line about the “arc of the moral universe” being long but bending “towards justice” means different things to different people. I believe it’s true. And I believe that, by believing it, we make it true.

I think that the bad laws we have been getting – the redefinition of marriage, the destruction of innocent human life, the attack on faith-based education etc are all rooted in a loss of faith in ultimate justice. When people feel alone in the universe, they reason from the point of view of their own security or what they believe makes them secure. So if I hate the idea of being old and feeble and finding it difficult to manage pain or discomfort or having to depend on people – well then I claim the right to end it all. And I demand that healthcare workers assist me and that nobody opposes my decision so that I don’t have to feel bad about my choice. My sexual activity gets a woman pregnant but I don’t want to be a father because I have other responsibilities and I haven’t bonded with the child – well then, it’s not really a child yet, is it, because it can’t think and feel and make decisions like me? So really wouldn’t it be kinder to that non-child to end its life rather than bring it into a world where its mother and father don’t really want it?

And if there is an organisation that warns that these choices I make are irrational and unjust – then who the hell are they to make me feel bad about myself? After all, they have plenty of dodgy people, abusers, paedophiles etc in their own ranks! So why should they be allowed run schools and hospitals and attempt to influence society with their troubling ideas?

That’s how nonsense descends into badness. But what the people who advance these negative values can never do is prevent new people from emerging who will challenge their groupthink. And the core value that challenges those negative values is an attractive one. It is that when we live for others, and temper our actions for the good of others, we are happier ourselves and others are happier.

Yet even though all of that makes perfect good sense on its own, even if there was no God, let us say, it seems also to be true that if people don’t have the sense of higher love and of ultimate purpose in their lives, they are unable to organise collectively for the common good. Which is why I believe that a revival of faith is crucial to a restoration of rationality in policy and law.

5.

It appears that very few Irish politicians have the intellectual acuity, or moral courage, to stand up to the dismantling of her core institutions by a small cadre of activists. Can you account for this?

One day, as I was going up in the lift to my office, I told a friend about a quip I made in the Seanad. “And did they all laugh?” she asked. “No,” I said, forgetting myself. “They are a dull lot.” At which point a civil servant whose name I don’t know, and whom I didn’t think was paying attention to us, burst out in laughing protest: “Now, Senator, that’s not true.”

He was right. They’re not all dull. Some of them are very bright people in the intellectual sense. Perhaps what I should have said is that many of them have been dulled – by political ambition, by rivalries, by the distraction of day-to-day activity, by the frenetic life of Leinster House and the demands of the constituency. And perhaps by their own compromises along the way. Few seem to have a philosophical cast of mind, and, of the few who do, some feel they can’t indulge such thoughts because it will get in the way of their goals and their alliances.

So why are they like that? Well, much of society is like that. In some ways, we are all influenced by the culture in the way we think or, sometimes, don’t think. We all have a personal vanity and ego problem to overcome, we are all sometimes well-intentioned but ignorant and we are always accompanied by our human weakness. Nobody fully escapes this human mediocrity. Some of these politicians feel pressures that everyone can relate to – a family to feed, the non-existence of a job to go back to if you lose your seat etc. And some politicians did not have the good fortune that I had – which is to know people who didn’t care what I thought of them who were ready to challenge any nonsense I might come out with.
But, when you look at our public life, it is impossible not to wonder how our supposedly Christian education system did so badly in forming people’s ideas and their characters. Maybe we expected too much from the education system. Or maybe there wasn’t enough of the good educators at secondary and third-level.

6.

The stand you have taken against the destruction of marriage and of human life has won you the opprobrium of many in Irish society, and much extremely vulgar abuse, especially online. How do you cope with it?

I pay very little attention to Twitter and other social media. I use it mainly to log some of my ideas, responses, activities and initiatives for the attention of those who are interested.

But I have seen enough of it to know that it has a strange effect on some people. I think there were always persons who, behind a civilised and mannerly surface, were willing to hurt other people if they could get away with it. Once upon a time, they just had the walls of public toilets to write on. Now they have social media. This even allows them to identify themselves and say what they want, however irrational and hurtful, without having to look you in the eye and without another person being present to witness their bad behaviour. But, perhaps in the antics of some of the hard Left, we see the next step downwards, which is that people would dare to be abusive in the street if only they can gather in numbers and avail of protection from each other. That is something we need to watch. And that’s why I think that some of these activists who were so abusive to Joan Burton TD out in Jobstown a few years ago, got off more lightly than they deserved to.

I’m glad to say that I get very little abuse in public. Perhaps occasionally somebody will be churlish to you at a party or someone will say something over their shoulder when they pass you in the street. But several times every week, people come up to met to thank me for speaking up for them. And I am sure Mattie McGrath, Peadar Tóibín, Carol Nolan and those other politicians who braved their party whips to speak up for the unborn in recent weeks and months must be having the same experience.

7.

After the Abortion Bill had passed through the Oireachtas you said that: “Once more we will see stirrings of idealism and a new generation will return and will demand a return to solidarity.” What did you mean by that?

Well, I genuinely believe that the Lord touches people’s hearts constantly and new people are inspired to raise their voices and get active in building a better world for us all to live in.

The media headline was that people voted decisively to reject the 8th Amendment. But one in three people have a different view from the majority. And many within the majority would not have wished to see abortion generally available even though we warned them that it would come about.

Loads of new people, including many young people, got involved in the LoveBoth and Save the Eighth campaigns. They’re not going to give up on this great cause just because we now have a corrupt and corrupting law in place. On the contrary.

And, of course, regardless of what the law is, there is still work to be done. The law may promote a fictitious “right to choose”, but it is up to people of goodwill to help others “choose what is right”. That means standing up for the right of unborn babies to live, but also accompanying women and men who feel unable to cope with the news of pregnancy yet who, with compassion and practical support, can make the better choice of giving and cherishing life. This is work that can unite No voters and Yes voters alike. While we disagree on whether abortion should ever be legal, we should all work to minimise recourse to it because it is a tragic and irreversible solution to a human dilemma.