The November 2012 death from septicaemia of an Indian woman, Ms Savita Halappanavar, at an Irish hospital and the subsequent claim from her husband that she had repeatedly asked for a termination of her pregnancy over a three-day period but was refused on the grounds that Ireland was a "Catholic country", has once again brought to the fore the issue of the separation of Church and State in Ireland. In response to the controversy that has arisen, this paper revisits the inspiring figure of Sean O'Faolain with a view to showing his relevance to today's debates. Reading O'Faolain in relation to the humanistic language of Edward Said, and consciously influenced by the latter's recommendation that scholarship be attuned to currents of the past as well as the present, this paper looks closely at O'Faolain's polemic, "The Priest in Politics", in which he invokes the inspiring, humanistic, intellectual example of Cardinal Newman, with a view to showing the importance of public intellectuals in bringing about change and the value of the strategic use of humanism in order to contest the hegemony of powerful institutions such as the Catholic Church.
