My letter from Dublin in the current issue of Prospect:

If there were a phrase to capture the year just passed in Ireland, and perhaps the Celtic Tiger era that preceded it, it must be “mental reservation.” This was the process by which the former archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond Connell, misled people about his handling of abuse complaints against the Catholic church, without apparently offending his conscience. …

It was perhaps surprising how much outrage this generated, given the totemic role of mental reservation in Irish public life. In 1927, having provoked a civil war in part over his refusal to countenance an oath of allegiance to the British king, Éamon de Valera re-entered the Irish parliament and took the oath. Later, though, he denied he had taken it. “I signed it in the same way as I signed an autograph for a newspaper,” he said.