Monarchy in Ireland

Theres one across the water that many Irish people do look to as part of their culture and heritage. Where will that link go in a united Ireland?

Irish Catholics as far as we can tell didn't deny the English crown as legitimate over Ireland even during penal times. The Gaelic Irish aristocratic class and poets had a strong and perhaps naive devotion to the Stuart monarchs.

Irish Republican ideology stems from the English civil war, the execution of King Charles I and ironically Cromwell. Cromwellian preachers and dissenters mistrusted all earthly Kings but also despised Catholicism. The bishops were wise to be wary of 18th century Republican ideology.

There was never a popular movement to revive an Irish High King or a Gaelic equivalent of the English Crown. To attempt that now would be unhistorical, novel and deeply untraditional.

My favourite defence of monarchy is C.S. Lewis's: "It would be much more rational to abolish the English monarchy. But how if, by doing so, you leave out the one element in our state which matters most? How if the Monarchy is the channel through which all the vital elements of citizenship – loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principal, splendour, ceremony, continuity – still trickle down to irrigate the dustbowl of modern economic Statecraft?”

I suppose the point is that rationality, or at least rationalism, can have quite a corrosive effect on society. The things that really bind and elevate a society are non-rational or perhaps supra-rational.

Before I became aware, through the internet, of various right-wing circles, I thought I was heroically contrarian and singular in supporting monarchy. Now I realize that there is a whole monarchist community. It doesn't always appeal to me, there's a lot of social snobbery and anti-democracy and elitism (the bad sort of elitism) involved in it, as far as I can tell. Most likely if any of us had lived in the pre-modern era we would have been peasants, not aristocrats.

My monarchism is pretty much a belief that it's nice to have someone to put on stamps and to present trophies at sporting occasions-- someone that, precisely because they are there because of an accident of birth, can represent the nation as a whole (and, even more importantly, through time), not whatever ideological elite exists at the moment.

I don't mind it being ahistorical so much. Traditions have to start somewhere.

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NewerThanTheyThink

We could elect a monarch by random lottery for a 12 month period to fulfill the symbolic role of the current office of President. Naturally it should be restricted to a group of sensible elder citizens of sound mind. He/she would be forbidden to make political speeches. It would be a compromise between classical constitutions and the modern without having the bother of elections.