Early this year, the launch of the St Patrick’s Festival by Ireland’s Arts Minister Catherine Martin provoked some discussion. Announcing the theme of “We Are One,” the Green Party politician emphasised the theme’s inclusivity while posing alongside a large group of people clad in eclectic – but decidedly non-Irish – dress: a group which included more than one drag queen.
As has become the norm, this event in honour of the patron saint who converted Ireland to Christianity made no reference to the illustrious Patrick. Moreover, the kick-off event had no connection to Irish culture at all. Indeed, the only recognisable sign of Irishness was the colour of Minister Martin’s coat: and in this case, this fashion statement may have been made on environmental rather than national grounds.
No European observer should be surprised about the gravity of the cultural change which has occurred in Ireland in recent decades, and yet few have considered the long-term implications for Ireland’s own sense of itself as a sovereign and unique country. Speaking at a National Conservatism conference in 2021, the British commentator Douglas Murray described how Ireland had “become a rapaciously advancing second type of liberalism society … worshipping every imaginable newly arrived god.”
He was not wrong. Ireland has not just caught up with the conventional social mores of post-Christian Europe, it is exceeding them. Five years after legalising abortion up to twelve weeks into pregnancy, the parliament now looks likely to extend the time limit while also abolishing the three-day waiting period, and the Green-driven coalition government is planning to ban any kind of peaceful protest outside abortion facilities: a step which virtually no other country has yet taken.
Eight years after the vote to introduce same-sex marriage, the prime minister Leo Varadkar is calling for a new constitutional change to disconnect marriage from family altogether. Biological males can be housed in women’s prisons – creating ideologically awkward challenges when a “female” prisoner is found to be a threat to “her” fellow inmates.
There is a parliamentary majority in favour of euthanasia, and while Spanish socialists condemn surrogacy as exploitative, Irish cabinet ministers embrace it. As in Orwell’s 1984, the radicalism of today’s ruling class is justified by a continuing distortion of the country’s past. Virtually every historical documentary, drama series or film now presents Catholic Ireland as an unbearably repressive and inhumane hell hole.
No historical context is provided, and those who attempt to highlight the good performed by the clergy and religious are generally silenced. Nuns have been targeted with a particular venom, and some of the most remarkable events in recent Irish history have been the reaction to the McAleese report on the Magdalene laundries in 2013 and the report on the Mother-and-Baby homes which came out in 2021: both of which were criticised for failing to reflect the now widely-held but ahistorical fantasies about greedy and callous religious sisters.
The rulers of Modern Ireland are at war with their country’s past. In their haste to sever their connection to the nation’s religious roots, they are ignoring some very obvious questions. After several centuries in which Catholicism and Irishness went hand-in-hand, what does the complete rejection of Christian heritage mean for Irish national identity? In a country which is now linguistically English, economically American, politically European, ethnically multicultural and religiously indifferent, what makes post-Catholic Ireland in any way distinctive?
It is true that there is more to Irish history than Catholicism. St Patrick’s mission to Ireland succeeded spectacularly, but sentimental nationalist thoughts about an ancient Irish nation do not reflect reality. While the people of Gaelic Ireland shared a language and culture (and after Patrick, a religion), the people of this island did not truly share a state. Not only did the perpetually warring Irish fiefdoms fail to develop significant towns of their own prior to the establishment of the Viking settlements, they also failed to develop a strong monarchy along continental lines which could develop the country and protect it from the inevitable invasion.
The absence of unity of purpose and national loyalty helps to explain how quickly Ireland fell to the Normans. It was not until the Reformation that the English monarchy began to acquire a more totalitarian approach in their dealings with their recalcitrant colonial outpost.
A disinterest in the long history of religious persecution of our ancestors is a hallmark of today’s Ireland.
The Irish people’s refusal to adopt the religion of their political overlords is now passed off as a merely incidental quirk of history, rather than what it was: the great fault line between the countries, and the battle which the world’s greatest empire could never win.
Many peoples initially wavered during Europe’s religious upheaval before eventually following the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio. It is hard to explain why Ireland did not convert; Hilaire Belloc maintained that Ireland’s religious steadfastness seemed to be “a phenomenon essentially miraculous in character.”1 What makes this relevant to the issue of identity is the impact which the Tudor revolt had on Ireland’s emerging national consciousness.
On this subject, the late Cambridge academic (and Catholic priest) Professor Brendan Bradshaw did groundbreaking work. Later generations have emphasised the French-inspired republicanism of Wolfe Tone and the other United Irishmen in the 1790s as the starting point for Irish nationalism. However, Bradshaw’s books like The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century and And so began the Nation clear how an increasingly anti-Catholic London government brought about a reconciliation between the Gaelic Irish and the “Old English” descendants of the original Norman settlers, a group which had not previously been culturally assimilated.
According to Bradshaw, from the mid-sixteenth century “the evidence indicates an increasing awareness among the Old English of the bonds that bound them to the Gaeil as the historic denizens of Ireland and as adherents alike of Roman Catholicism.” Though the natives and the descendants of the Normans continued to feud in a similar manner to how the Gaelic Irish fought amongst themselves, religious loyalty gradually began to supersede ethnic kinship. On the eve of the disastrous wars of the 1640s, the leaders of both factions were ready to take the momentous step “of discarding ethnicity altogether as a form of collective identity in favour of the common national designation of Irish Catholic.”2
The savagery of the Cromwellian conquest and land settlement made concrete the eternal separation between Protestant Britain and Catholic Ireland. During the centuries of humiliation afterwards, Irish Catholics eked out a bare existence in their own country, where they existed without land, liberty or even the comfort of free religious practice.
In considering Ireland’s evolving self-identity, it is worth reflecting upon how much had been lost by the nineteenth century, by which time an increasingly self-confident and prosperous Catholic community could begin the march towards political autonomy. The old Gaelic political order had been annihilated, and when Daniel O’Connell led some of the world’s first popular political movements, he operated within the Westminster model of politics, not that of his Gaelic ancestors.
English had replaced Irish as the vernacular, and the beginning of organised public education in the nineteenth century accelerated this process of Anglicisation. Irish cultural practices across areas such farming and clothing had been largely replaced by imported variants from Britain. The only important cultural attribute which had not been taken away was the Catholic religion, and in this environment of cultural impoverishment, it was little surprise that Catholicism became, in effect, the national identity.
Monsignor Patrick Corish – arguably the greatest historian of Irish Catholicism – summed up the changes thus: “In this long-drawn-out struggle, the old Irish order was worn down, and, in the end, destroyed. Yet the very destruction of the old political order led to a greater attachment to the old religion, which had, during these disturbed years, undergone a deep spiritual revival and reformation.”3 Not only did Irish Catholicism fulfil the people’s deep psychological and emotional longing for a sense of themselves and their countrymen’s place in the world, the Church was also at the forefront of Ireland’s social development after the catastrophic Great Famine.
It has become common in recent times for anti-Catholic voices to attempt to suggest that Ireland’s deep religiosity only commenced after the Famine, and was in some way a baleful puritanical legacy of that tragedy. It is certainly true that the stern morality of Victorian Britain paled in comparison with Ireland from the Famine onwards. Here too, though, the story is more complicated. Even rather critical observers such as the sociologist Tom Inglis have acknowledged the formative role of the post-Famine Church and its celibate priesthood in forging a more disciplined and modernised society.4
Emmet Larkin, the Irish-American historian of the nineteenth century, believed that the Catholic Church had “provided an impoverished and oppressed people with consolation, hope, discipline, and cultural and national identity.” In recent times, many people have been led to believe that there was a “handover” of the country’s education and healthcare sectors to the Church post-independence, rather than a continuation of a system in which the religious carried out the lion’s share of the social and educational work in institutions they had themselves developed. In this vision of history, a nefarious and power-hungry Catholic Church replaces the British as the colonial power post-1922.
This revisionist account ignores a great many facts about the period preceding independence and the Church’s already powerful role as the pre-eminent societal institution. It does not acknowledge the role Catholicism played in binding the new state together and thus avoiding the sort of political violence which has bedevilled other postcolonial societies. It ignores the international connectedness which the Catholic identity provided to the Irish people, in a world where the Irish had been the main leadership classes in the English-speaking world, and where the vast Irish Catholic missionary tradition would create a “Spiritual Empire” to rival the political and military empires of other European peoples. Above all else, it does not take account of the overarching cultural weakness of the independent Irish nation state, which necessitated an unhealthy emphasis on a religious identity too often tainted by anti-intellectualism, a weak tradition of social thought and an unhealthy focus on sexual morality.
The popular understanding of the secularisation of Ireland is hopelessly inadequate. In the standard telling, a devout nation is horrified by revelations of sexual and physical abuse, and this results in a dramatic collapse in religious belief and practice.
Every European country has secularised, but it is hard to find any example of a country where the Church’s collapse has been so complete, where the nation has become so enthralled with Woke ideology and where the widespread religiosity of the past is looked upon with much contempt and little nostalgia. The truth appears to be that Irish Catholicism was easy to abandon, because it seems to have been so hard to love. Though the Church created an impressive physical infrastructure from the nineteenth century on, there was no corresponding effort to create the sort of vibrant Catholic culture that still permeates countries like Italy and Spain, and is most vividly seen during public celebrations such as the Easter processions in Andalucía.
There was a weakness in both theology and Catholic social thinking in Ireland,5 6 and at its period of greatest dominance, Catholic Ireland proved itself completely incapable of inspiring Irish people to use their innate gifts when it came to literature or music to express or explain religious faith. Not only did the country not develop a Catholic literary tradition of its own, the work of Catholic authors from elsewhere like Graham Greene was banned by the censorship regime.
All of this helped to produce an environment where not only was it easy to turn one’s back on religion, it has also become a natural step to close the door on deeper discussions of human existence. The fruits of Unholy Modern Ireland extend beyond the newfound political infatuation with modernity and progressivism. They include a plummeting birth rate, skyrocketing abortion numbers, more crime, more suicides, more loneliness, more chaos in families and more lawlessness on Irish streets.
Writing thirty years ago, the writer and intellectual Desmond Fennell identified the emerging social decay which had become obvious in Dublin as the country slowly secularised before the avalanche of clerical scandals.
“The value of Irish Catholicism becomes palpably evident as its influence on lives diminishes and nothing emerges to fill the vacuum but security personnel and paraphernalia, more police and vigilantes, more courts and prisons, state allowances for unmarried mothers and deserted spouses, rape crisis centres, campaigns promoting condoms, the great and increasing sums of money which pay for all this, and windy, impotent moralising,” Fennell wrote.7
Of all the recent writers on Irish politics and society, Fennell was the most focused on questions of identity, and he was greatly disturbed by the provincial nature of Irish society prior to the collapse of religion. Seeing the widespread rejection of Catholicism as the final blow to Irishness as a distinct culture and being disgusted by the country’s “post-nationalist condition,” Fennell chose to emigrate to Italy.8
Now, a generation on, everything that Fennell lamented about the politically independent but culturally derivative Irish nation can be said with ever greater force. We have not begun to scratch the surface in examining what is signified by the widespread abandonment of Christianity in Ireland. The replacing of Catholicism with a form of liberationist neo-paganism has had a predictably detrimental social impact, but in the long-term, there are possibly more ruinous implications in store.
No country can survive without a national identity, and for centuries, Ireland’s identity was inextricably connected with Catholicism. No serious proposal has been put forward for what the replacement identity is or should be. The Woke infatuation is a partial effort in this respect, but it is failing to provide any of the positive benefits which flow from a shared adherence to a coherent set of beliefs.
In recent decades, we have seen the beginning of another massive cultural change: large-scale immigration. For the most part, this has been a positive development which has not led to the social unrest which exists elsewhere in Europe. However, Ireland was particularly fortunate early on – and in a manner that post-Catholic liberals would find difficult to acknowledge. Not only did Catholics from central and eastern Europe make up a large proportion of the first arrivals, they were joined by many Filipinos, while a disproportionate number of Nigerians were Christian and a stunning forty percent of those Indians who came were actually Catholics: often nurses from Kerala. Regardless of how awkward it is for many secular observers to acknowledge, religious commonalities aid in integration, and they seem to have done so in Ireland.
According to the initial findings from the 2022 Census however, there has been a change. Not only has the percentage of Irish people identifying as Catholic fallen to just sixty-nine percent, there have been sharp increases in the size of the Muslim and Hindu populations. For decades, nations with rich and distinctive national identities like Italy, Germany and France have failed miserably in assimilating large populations from very different cultures, and that failure has had wide-reaching social ramifications. In time, more Irish politicians and people will likely come to realise the difficulties involved in encouraging newcomers to become part of a society which has no strong sense of its place in the world.
Being a bastion of social progressivism is an identity of sorts, but all this tells a new arrival is that Ireland has moved on from religion several generations later than its continental counterparts. We define ourselves more by what we have rejected and why, but unlike the devout believers of yesteryear, there is no positive vision for what Ireland actually is or should be. Thus we see the Irish Arts Minister launching St Patrick’s Festival while studiously avoiding reference to St Patrick. Thus we see the political class stumbling about in search of a new public holiday, before at last choosing the feast day of a female saint out of a sheer lack of imagination, before instantly seeking to secularise the feast day and obscure the division between the actual saint and a pagan goddess of a similar name.
And thus do we bear annual witness to the obscene goings on in the White House when Irish prime ministers present shamrock to US Presidents, while awkwardly invoking God’s blessing on Ireland and America and working in the mandatory reference to St. Patrick’s true importance as an early example of an undocumented immigrant.
Ireland remains backward just as sneering liberal critics have always claimed.
European politics is generally moving rightwards. The absence of a populist-right party in Ireland is becoming ever more unusual. When it does eventually emerge – possibly as a result of the social tensions caused by unprecedented immigration levels – it is likely that a form of religious and cultural traditionalism will be part of such a party’s offering.
The beleaguered Catholic minority would be wise not to put their faith in any such efforts, for their salvation will not come through political attachments. Indeed, the greater durability of Catholic identity in the six Irish counties still governed by Britain demonstrates the occasional advantages derived from maintaining a healthy detachment from the resident political authority.
Irish Catholics need to find their niche in a multicultural and hostile environment where they exist now as a subculture. This will take time to master: English Catholics have had five centuries of practice, and even the Catholics of Italy have had to learn how to balance their religious and national identities given the anti-clerical nature of the nineteenth century movement which unified the Italian state.
In time, as the scandals and the sense of lost status recedes into the mists of time, this will happen. Irish Catholics will begin anew the work of St Patrick in a hostile pagan land. The more formidable task is not that placed on the shoulders of the dwindling number of Catholics in Ireland, but that facing those who have consciously rejected their own history – those who have attacked the tree’s roots while assuming it will still provide them with rest and shelter.
This assumption is silly, as is the idea of a St Patrick’s Festival without St Patrick. More ridiculous still is the idea that the last 1,600 years of national history can be erased without mortally wounding the soulless geographic entity which now remains: what Desmond Fennell rightly lambasted as “the ghost nation.”9
The hardest truth is that Catholicism can survive fine without Ireland, while Irishness without Catholicism is a project that already looks doomed.
1. Belloc, H. Europe and the Faith (1920)
2. Bradshaw, B. ‘’And so began the Irish Nation:” Nationality, National Consciousness and Nationalism in Pre-modern Ireland (2015)
3. Corish, P. A History of Irish Catholicism: Volume 3 (1968)
4. Inglis, T. Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland (1998)
5. Twomey, V. The End of Irish Catholicism? (2003)
6. Whyte, J.H., Church & State in Modern Ireland 1923-1970 (1971)
7. Fennell, D. Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland (1993)
8. Elliott, M. When God Took Sides: Religion and Identity in Ireland (2009)
9. Fennell, D. Savvy and the Preaching of the Gospel (2003)
About the Author: James Bradshaw
James Bradshaw writes on topics including history, culture, film and literature.