with some article of the constitution.”
“Exactly, suppose he did disagree. Suppose he woke up one morning vexed for some reason or hung-over from a feed of drink and he said give me another look at that constitution. So he reads through the whole thing and somewhere along the way, it doesn’t matter where, he says stall the digger this has to be changed, I can’t stand over this. So he takes out a pen and strikes through an article and rewrites it. Now in that case there wouldn’t be a thing anyone could do about it, it’s his constitution as it says itself. It wouldn’t even have to go to the people.”1
“JJ, if God were to appear here in the half-parish of Kilgeever He would have more things on his mind than amending the constitution. And as for sinking pints up in Thornton’s . . . ”
The class collapsed in guffaws.
“Spirits would be His drink, wouldn’t it, sir?” someone called from the back of the class. “Top shelf.”
“No,” someone else said. “Wine would be His drink, wouldn’t it, sir, that cheap Italian stuff? Or that stuff monks brew in monasteries. I’d say you couldn’t keep it drawn to Him if He got started.”
JJ looked down at his desk. I waited for the laughter to die down.
“JJ, if God were to sit down and rewrite the constitution there wouldn’t be a problem. By definition God is all good and virtuous so anything He wrote would be on the side of good, both private and public, and hence unarguable. It would be interesting, however, to find out just how near or far our constitution diverged from the Divine Law. De Valera would be interested; he’d be up out of his grave in a shot.”
“There wouldn’t be a problem if God was true to your definition of Him . . . ”
“You don’t accept the definition? God is God, JJ.”
“I’ll go along with it for the sake of argument. The real problem arises if there is no God. Supposing someone was to stand up with definite proof that He did not exist—then the arse and foundation would fall out of the whole thing. All laws in this country would be groundless. No one would be bound by them any more.”
“That doesn’t follow. In that situation all we would be left with was the law of the land without divine source.”
“No, this is an interim constitution. It is predicated on God’s existence. It gets its authority from God and is directed towards God: it begins and ends in God. Now if God is absent then it collapses and has to be written again. We’d have to start from the beginning.”
“Interim or not, JJ, it has served the country since 1937 . . . ”
“With twenty-eight amendments.”
“OK, twenty-eight amendments. That doesn’t discredit it. Constitutional amendment is part of an evolving democracy. Even if I accept your argument the onus is still on you to prove that God does not exist and that is where you’re stuck.”
JJ shook his head. “My point is that there is a denial of intellectual conscience in the constitution. The opening sentence, article six, it runs right through the whole document. The faithless are blackballed from the off and that is a denial of the very freedom and dignity it purports to uphold. It does not legislate for the faithless. Under its own terms they are quite literally unconstitutional or, to use Cearbhall O’Dalaigh’s phrase, repugnant to the constitution. They can hardly be classed as citizens.”
The bell went and the rest of the class began gathering up their books. Not for the first time they’d found themselves lost in the wake of JJ’s reasoning. I needed a breath of fresh air myself.
“Time out, JJ,” I said. “We’ll continue this another day. Is this another of these mindrot meditations?”
“It was just an idea,” he said, “just an idea I had.”
“I’m impressed. You don’t believe in God or the constitution?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe in them, it’s just that I have no faith in them.” His face brightened suddenly. “Suppose . . . ”
I opened the door. “No, JJ. Suppose and suppose and suppose. Some other day.”
* * *
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